Thursday, February 21, 2008

Changing your password on the Gnome Keyring

So I noticed this annoying bug in Gutsy where when you change your password, gnome-keyring starts prompting you for a password, and you have to put your old one in there to satisfy it. I believe this is because what happens is, when you setup your account, Ubuntu sets the password on the keyring to be the same as your login password and sets up pam to try your login password on the keyring. This makes things nice and smooth when your account is new. If, however, you change your password (say, because you were using synergy and not paying attention and accidently typed it into an IRC channel...), your login password no longer satisfys the keyring, which is still set to your old password. So, this is an improvement, because you used to *always* have to put in your password, but its kind of half-assed.  (Now, maybe I changed my password from the command line, rather then through the gui (is there a change password gui? probably), and maybe the gui would have changed the keyring password and kept everything solid, I don't know).  

Anyways, this wasn't a show stopper, just a small annoyance, so I let it ride for a while, and just put my old password in whenever I logged in and connected to a private network. Then I got sick enough of it to poke around. I found this bug. I installed  seahorse ( sudo apt-get install seahorse ), ran it (shows up in Accessories and its called "Passwords and Encryption Keys"), went to Edit->Preferences, hit up the GNOME Keyring tab, and voila! theres the change password dialoge for the keyring. I set it to my new passwords and things are right again. 

Edit, woops, someone else already figured this out, with illustrations!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for this easy guide. No more annying pop-up at login for me :)