Monday, November 18, 2019

Password to unlock your keyring

Why does Ubuntu keep asking for a “password to unlock your keyring” one some computers and how to fix the problem. My mother has had this on her computer for years, but she’s too old to be of any help with starting a remote session, and when I am in Eupen I am too busy to sit down and do a research.

But now I saw the same problem for Iiris on Rose.

The Gnome keyring is an otherwise useful program to store passwords in a centralized place so that that you don’t need to type them once you are logged in. The program usually just silently watches whether it can help. When you authenticate somewhere, it asks you whether you want that authentication to automatically happen when you are logged it. Firefox unfortunately does not use this system, so you cannot disable Firefox asking you for your master password.

But it can happen that you changed your Linux login password and the keyring password was not updated. And then, as soon as some application wants to use the keyring, it will ask you to enter that famous “password to unlock your keyring”.

The easiest way to fix this is to simply reset everything (i.e. delete all stored passwords and start a new keyring):

$ cd ~/.local/share/keyrings $ mv login.keyring login.keyring.backup

Thanks to the following sources:

• https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeKeyring

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/65281/how-to-recover-reset-forgotten-gnome-keyring-password

• https://www.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/6sr1f7/what_is_this_gnomekeyring_that_keeps_asking_for_a/

Edit 20191125: no, that wasn’t the solution. The problem is still there. Needs more research.

The user_type of an ar.get_user() should never be empty