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Re: Lost graphical ssh-askpass with Xfce4 in forky



On 26/09/2025 02:59, Julian Gilbey wrote:

I am no longer presented with
a graphical interface to enter my ssh key passphrase to add it to the
session keyring.

I can say nothing related to XFCE. In my notes I have a mention of gnome-keyring-daemon for GNOME session on Ubuntu and it was 5 years ago. The related setting was "SSH Key Agent" in gnome-session-properties.

I do have the session
manually running ssh-add in a terminal works,

Do you get a GUI prompt in response to the following command?

    ssh-add </dev/null

(when no keys are loaded)

xfce4-session-Message: 18:07:24.229: GNOME compatibility is enabled and gnome-keyring-daemon is found on the system. Skipping gpg/ssh-agent startup.

Switching off GNOME compatibility didn't help, and my backups show
that this message appeared in .xsession-errors even before the
upgrade, so there's no change here.

My experience is that gpg-agent from openssh-client prefers to ask pass phrase in the current terminal window and some other agent should be running to provide GUI prompt.

I'm stumped.  Could anyone suggest where to look to find the cause of
this changed behaviour?

There is a number of ssh-agent implementations and they may be started in various ways (Xsession, systemd user session, maybe with socket activation).

I would start from inspecting what variant provides agent socket in your case. Check environment variables and process tree. Examples of threads with earlier discussions of ssh-agents:

- Re: Upgrade to Bookworm, now GNOME keyring dies--no access to stored SSH key passwords. Tue, 15 Aug 2023 09:28:48 +0700.
  <https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/ubent2$fqj$1@ciao.gmane.io>
- Re: emacs service and session start. Thu, 29 Aug 2024 22:14:06 +0700.
  <https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/vaq380$h36$1@ciao.gmane.io>


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