I'm really far from having an answer to your questions, but I can say that on my laptop Gentoo system I have no polkit/consolekit/udisks/upower (which are considered kind of evil bloatware by some Gentoo forum users that I consider wise people).
I use udevil (which I like more than pmount) for mounting external drives without root privileges. I have a minimal desktop with just Openbox and Tint2, and almost never use a gui file manager (on the rare occasions, I use spacefm, fro the same author of udevil). I use wpa_supplicant for networking. However, I do have PAM: it's used to allow jackd to be run with realtime scheduling by the unprivileged user [1]. It can be done without PAM [2], but using PAM is more convenient. [1]: http://www.jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html [2]: http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?title=Realtime_(RT)_Kernel#without_PAM -- Emanuele Rusconi -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
