A few days ago, polkit version 0.113 was marked stable on Gentoo amd64. Since the update, I could no longer suspend my system without entering the root password. Quite annoying, especially for a laptop. When canceling the polkit dialog, this appeared in the journal (yes, I am using systemd):

sep 10 05:22:52 sylvester.nomad.adlevio.net polkitd[18113]: Operator of unix-session:3 FAILED to authenticate to gain authorization for action org.freedesktop.login1.suspend for system-bus-name::1.96 [kded5 [kdeinit5]] (owned by unix-user:stijn)

While configuring my CalDAV accounts in Thunderbird on my new laptop, I ran into an issue. I have a few CalDAV accounts that are all on the same Zimbra server. Thunderbird only requested a login and password for the first account I added. It tried to open the next account I added with the credentials that were already stored for the first account, and that failed.

As I already mentioned in my previous post about the XPS 13, I had issues with the touchpad: it freezes rather frequently, because it looses sync a lot. After losing sync for a few times, the psmouse driver issues a reconnect request. And when that happens, the touchpad freezes. It looks like this in the kernel log:

Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 4
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: issuing reconnect request

Many people I know use a laptop for almost anything, anywhere. When they arrive at the office, they hook it up to an external monitor, and use an external keyboard and mouse or trackpad. I prefer to have a proper workstation, with powerful CPU and GPU, lots of RAM and multiple large monitors. As it's rather difficult to take this setup with me to meetings, or when travelling, I still require a secondary device that I can take with me everywhere I go. Some people seem to be OK with a tablet for that purpose, but that just doesn't work for me.

In a previous post I explained how to configure syslog-ng to accept logs from other hosts on the network. Back then I used a filter to only write logs from a specific host to a specific destination.