I broke my kwallet auto login

Help
1

I left my home folder unintentionally set to read-only for a short while, oops! Now when I open up a KDE session, the kwallet is no longer unlocked, and whenever an app wants access to it I get a prompt for a manual password input even though it is set to use my login password. How would I best fix this? Any hints to undo my silly mistake would be appreciated.

2

Can you clarify what exactly you did to make this happen?

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3

I replaced /home with a different and empty partition, but then forgot to create the user folder. So the home folder was set to a non-existing subfolder, the entire partition was only writable by root, and the config seemed a little confused. Once I repaired this and rebooted, most things worked but kwallet auto unlock still doesn’t.

KWallet works on all my other postmarketOS machines, only on this one it broke.

4

Might be a case of “turn it off and on again.” e.g.:

  • disable and re-enable auto-login
  • rename your old wallet to something else and then change it to being named “kdewallet”
  • change your user account’s password to something else and then change it back
  • uninstall the kwallet-pam package and re-install it
5

I already tried re-creating the wallet, since after the home folder was writable again it manually asked me to do so and manually user a password (where I entered my user password). How would I change the wallet auto-unlock? Sorry if that’s an obvious button somewhere, but I can’t see it in the kwallet settings.

6

Auto-wallet-unlock requires the following conditions that I’m aware of:

  • kwallet-pam package is installed
  • wallet is named kdewallet
  • wallet’s password is the same as your user account’s login password

There may be other requirements too, like maybe permissions and ownership being correct, but I don’t know about those.

7

I just double-checked all three of these conditions, and reinstalled kwallet-pam and rebooted, and sadly it doesn’t work. Opening up kwalletmanager after logging in says “The ‘kdewallet’ wallet is currently closed.” There must be some sort of initial setup step that my read-only home prevented that I perhaps have to trigger manually now.

8

On Fedora f42 Plasma Edition, there is no package that I can find named kwallet-pam.

$ sudo dnf list kwallet*
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Installed packages
kwalletmanager5.x86_64 25.08.1-1.fc42  updates

Available packages
kwallet.x86_64         4.12.3-27.fc42  fedora
kwalletmanager.x86_64  15.04.3-26.fc42 fedora
kwalletmanager5.i686   24.12.3-1.fc42  fedora

Would you please suggest a different one? Thanks!

(The thing about having to unlock my wallet with my login password just after unlocking my screen with this same password never made sense to me—unless I use a different one for kwallet, which I’ve found no way to change. :slight_smile: )

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9

Interestingly, I’ve read about a person with that problem with GNOME keyring just today. It seems surprisingly common. Perhaps the wallet UIs should consider a “fix autounlock” button.

10

I just found out ksystemstats isn’t launching for me either. It seems like some autostart things weren’t set up as intended, which given the briefly read-only home folder makes sense. :face_with_peeking_eye: But it’s not quite clear to me how to fix that.

11

After seeing your thread, and having experienced a peculiar effect of having to constantly re-enter my login password to a kwallet prompt GUI panel myself, I opened the kwalletmanager Settings→Configure Wallet… panel and reset it to the defaults. It fixed my issue. Have you tried doing that yet?

Good luck!

12

I just tried it and rebooted, sadly it didn’t fix it.

13

I concluded that this situation and the lack of a solution probably is some sort of bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=511471