Ni! Update to Crimson was quite smooth, except for one thing : flatpaks that kept secrets in the Gnome keyring started complaining about an incorrect secret, and the application would refuse to start. For me this happened with Authenticator, Flare and Fractal.
I found a solution to the problem and thought it was worth documenting it here. It was caused by the way flatpak communicates with more recent gnome-keyring, using a portal, which wasn’t the case before. That is explained in detail here:
So, the way I solved the issue was to:
Disable gnome-keyring-daemon, to stop the “Secret” portal
systemctl --user stop gnome-keyring-daemon
Start the affected apps, which will work because there’s no portal
Backup any data you may need to preserve (I exported my Authenticator keys)
Remove the apps, purging their data
flatpak uninstall --delete-data ${package}
Install seahorse (aka “Passwords and Keys”) and remove any keys created by the affected apps from all keyrings
Restart gnome-keyring-daemon
systemctl --user start gnome-keyring-daemon
Reinstall the apps and import the backed up data
Took me a while to figure out what was happening, so I hope this can save you the trouble.
I have the same problem on my Librem5 with Authenticator. Unfortunately the above solution does not seem to work: after I enter the command to stop the keyring daemon there is no feedback (such as ‘daemon stopped’ or anything), and the same Secret Service error message appears when I start the Authenticator.
I am not a big fan of this whole keyring thing as it is, and this doesn’t help.
Are there other solutions to this problem? I don’t mind if this includes uninstalling Seahorse and the whole keyring facility. Your help will be greatly appreciated, especially because this is the only part of the L5 I need for work.
I am on Crimson. But I gave up on trying to get the Authenticator working again. I just removed in and installed another one: Clockodev-vlooks nice, does the job equally well.
Strange error though: when I try to fire up the camera in order to read a QR code, I get some message about a pipeline not working. (Can’t give you the exact wording just now, because my L5 is refusing to start up after the battery had been depleted; it always has to charge for hours after that before it will restart. Never a dull moment with an L5!)
Sorry, can’t help you much with that, I’ve never used Clockode. Since this topic is about gnome-keyring, you might get more attention if you start an on-topic thread.
Weird error messages that are of no consequence have been part of Linux for a long time. So if you get “failed to start pipeline …” but the authenticator app works, I would ignore the error message.
The Authenticator app by Bilal Elmoussaoui used to work fine - camera function and all. It did ask for the keyring to be unlocked at start up - as it should do.
After the update to Crimson, Ahthenticator complained about no Secret Service being available, and refused to start at all. Since the above solution did not work for me, I decided to just delete it and set up my 2fa codes anew.
Two years ago when I started using 2fa’s, Authenticator was one of the few - if not the only - app that worked on the L5. Because I was curious whether by now it had been joined by others, I thought I´d give Clockode a try. Turns out it works nicely, except for the camera function: the camera does not start after hitting the button in the app. I have to start up the camera myself and copy/paste the required key by hand.
I have no doubt Authenticator would have worked just as well, had I chosen to reinstall that.