How to use PAM to unlock the KDE wallet in plasma

Some asked how to use PAM to unlock a KDE Wallet, since it seems not to be working out of the box after the recent updates.

This is a brief description of a work around to use until things will be fixed.

Prerequisites: login password and the wallet password must be the same, and the default wallet should be named kdewallet (the default name as far as I understand).

kwallet_pam and sddm-qt5 have some issues. This is how to fix them.

1. kwallet_pam drops pam_kwallet5.so in /usr/lib64/security while PAM presently searches in /lib/security

So mv, cp or ln the module to the new location:

Code:
ln -s /usr/lib64/security/pam_kwallet5.so /lib/security/pam_kwallet5.so2. kwallet_pam comes with a shell script that will communicate the password to kwalletd5 for unlocking the wallet. This script requires "socat" which is not part of slackware or ktown.

So you need to grab and install it from here:

http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/

Alternatively you can grab the package and install it from my repository:

http://www.istitutocolli.org/slack/socat/

3. in order for PAM to actually use pam_kwallet5.so you need to edit /etc/pam.d/sddm:

Change this line:

Code:
auth include logininto this one:

Code:
auth substack login(as far as I understand -- I'm new to PAM too -- "include" will prevent the evaluation of the following line if it returns a "done". "substack" does not.

Your wallet should now be unlocked at login time.

Hope this helps.

andrea