Unable to start g-v-m

Are you sure that you started gnome-volume-manager with option '-n'?

If so, can you please do

  killall gnome-volume-manager
  strace -o gvm.trace gnome-volume-manager -n

and attach gvm.trace here?

killall gnome-volume-manager does nothing since there is no process running.
Attached the strace output.

For now, i've reverted to g-v-m 1.5.13-0ubuntu3 since it is the last version that is working for me.

Creating file '/var/run/console/$USER:' I got g-v-m running, but the file gets deleted at every reboot. Searching around, i found that this have to do with pam_foreground, which I can't configure myself. I'm wrong?

Ah, that explains a lot, thanks for tracking this down. That file is supposed to be created by libpam-foreground (which is a dependency of g-v-m). The idea of that is to not start g-v-m if you remotely log into a machine, since you do not have access to the local storage devices then. Do you do this?

No, I work as local user, i own the machine. I think the problem is, that I manually modified the common-auth and common-passwd files to have kerberos authentication, so they weren't modified when libpam-foreground were installed the firts time.
To let you know, i've put pam-foregroundso in common-session to get g-v-m working again.

Ah, thank you, that explains the issue. Matthew, I assume there is no chance to add the module even for a modified PAM configuration?

We can't modify conffiles that the user has modified locally, no. I'm not sure what the best workaround is.

This seems to bite quite many people. Maybe libpam-foreground could show an update notification or a debconf note if the PAM configuration was modified manually?

Here is the contents of my pam.d directory, as Martin requested in bug #43035.

I should also mention that everything works great after adding the following to /etc/pam.d/common-session:

session optional pam_foreground.so

Fixed in feisty (at least).

Fixed in Feisty? That's good. Any chance of an Edgy backport?
I really can't move this machine to Feisty yet (because of possible
breakage).

8.10 alpha uses a different method.