Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Unlock the Gnome keyring upon login - Xubuntu

As many people already noticed NetworManager uses gnome-keyring to store password for different wireless networks. This is already true for Dapper Drake.

In Edgy and Feisty more and more programs start to use gnome-keyring for the same purpose. To name a few: Evolution, Gajim.

This is quite annoying because one has to unlock the keyring database every time one logs in. On my desktop with freshly installed Feisty I use only Gajim from those three. Which makes storing my google talk password virtually useless.

Fortunately there is a solution: pam-keyring.
Here you'll find how to install it for Feisty.

Shortly how its done:
sudo apt-get install libpam-keyring
sudo echo "@include common-pamkeyring" >> /etc/pam.d/gdm
Unfortunately it didn't work on my Xubutu at first.
Apparently one has to disable "Launch Gnome services on startup" to make it work.

What seems to happen is that xfce4-session lunches new instance of gnome-keyring-deamon without checking if there is already a running one. This new instance of course does not have the keyring database unlocked by pam-keyring, hence we get the password popup.

I've filled a bug report we'll see what happens...

3 comments:

AV said...

Hnm. After I enter the second line after installing the keyring, I get a "permission denied" message. I'm in sudo, so I'm confused.

conrad said...

First of all this solution was for Feisty. I think even for Gutsy it was not needed but maybe I'm wrong - I haven't used XFCE for some time now.

As for permision denied - wierd. Check if the file exists and what permisions are set for it. Maybe it is protected by apparmor??

Unknown said...

I tried this and was locked out with an error:
> error initiating conversation with authentication system - general failure.

So, watch out!