Network Manager permissions (nm-applet)

One of the most popular desktop network managers is called (in the Debian repos) “network-manager” and a way to control this is to use “nw-applet”

When building my desktop I discovered, if you install it and “xdg” it will get started automatically (see /etc/xdg/autostart/) .. so if this is the case dont bother starting it manually.

I also discovered some permission issues with it, when it was reporting:

"(32) Insufficient privileges"

or

"(32) Not authorized to control networking"

This can be fixed by using policy kit and creating the following file:

/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pkla

Then putting the following content within:

[nm-applet]
Identity=unix-group:network
Action=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.*
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes