How to disable the "unlock your keyring" popup?

Fire up "User Accounts", set "automatic login" to "off". At startup you will be asked your user/password only once; popups like "unlock keyring" will never pester you again.


This is for 14.04

  1. Open the password/keyring manager from settings (or run it directly - seahorse)
  2. Ensure Menu > View > By Keyring is ticked.
  3. In the sidebar, under 'passwords' create a new keyring 'Unprotected' (or re-use an existing keyring, e.g. 'Default', but NOT 'Login' because that will make everything unprotected which you probably don't want)
  4. Right-click the new keyring, and 'set as default'
  5. Right-click the new keyring and set its password as empty (only needed if you adopted an existing keyring)
  6. In the 'Login' keyring, delete the network secret for your wifi.
  7. Go to the network manager and add the network again - its secret should appear in the default keyring, which has no password.
  8. Set the default keyring back to Login.

About the Chrome and the keyrings

This problem occurs because Chrome wants to store usernames/passwords in the keyring (so they are encrypted). Therefore, every time you open Chrome, it tries to unlock the keyring.

Please note that, in Linux, Chrome can use different keyring types for the passwords you store in the browser:

  • Basic keyring: where Chrome stores passwords in a local SQLite database called “Login Data” ($HOME/.config/chromium/Default/Login Data). There, the passwords are unencrypted.
  • Desktop keyrings: (i.e., gnome-keyring or KWallet) where Chrome stores the passwords in the services provided by GNOME or KDE. It stores the encrypted passwords in a special database that must be unlocked before it can be used.

To disable the “unlock your keyring” popup permanently, you may (1) instruct Chrome to avoid the desktop keyrings or (2) create a desktop keyring or modify the default one using Seahorse (for GNOME) or KDE Wallet Manager (for KDE).

You may instruct Chrome to avoid the desktop keyrings and use a local database. If you do that, Chrome will not try to unlock the keyring again. However, every time you instruct Chrome to "remember a password", the password will be stored in plan-text in the your local computer. An expert user may get access to your passwords in plan-text if you use this alternative. This solution is recommended only if you do not ask Chrome to remember your passwords.

Instructing Chrome to avoid the keyring

To run Chrome without using the keyring, you may use the option --password-store=basic:

$ google-chrome --password-store=basic

Modifying the Chrome launcher (icon) to avoid the keyring

Considering that you usually run Chrome doing a doble-click on an icon, you must change the command for the icons you use to include the additional option to run chrome in this way all the time. You may edit (1) the global launcher in the /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop folder or (2) the personal launcher file located in the ~/.local/share/applications/ directory.

  1. Edit the launcher file. For instance, using gedit

     sudo vi /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

  2. Modify the Exec= line to include the --password-store=basic option

     Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome  --password-store=basic (and any other option you want)

Tags:

Gnome Keyring

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