QDBusConnection: name 'org.kde.kwalletd' had owner ''

English Applications
1

This is mostly a curiosity question. I would like to understand what is going on. There’s probably a bug somewhere, but I am not sure where.

This was on an old slow 32-bit system. I had just done updates (“zypper patch” followed by “zypper up”).

Out of curiosity, I tried

# zypper dup -D

I expected it to tell me that there was nothing to do. Instead, I was surprised by the answer, although that isn’t the point of this question.

Here is part of what I saw on my screen:


The following NEW package is going to be installed:
  openSUSE-release-ftp 


The following 195 packages are going to be reinstalled:
...


1 new package to install, 195 to reinstall.
Overall download size: 280.4 MiB. Already cached: 0 B  After the operation, 
additional 903.9 KiB will be used.
Continue? [y/n/? shows all options] (y): QDBusConnection: name 'org.kde.kwalletd' had owner '' but we thought it was ':1.45'
Invalid answer 'QDBusConnection: name 'org.kde.kwalletd' had owner '' but we thought it was ':1.45''. [y/n/? shows all options] (y): 
Continue? [y/n/? shows all options] (y):

Here are two questions:

(1) What was going on to cause that weird “QDBusConnection:” message to appear on my screen.

(2) Why did “zypper” see that message as input (as if I had typed it). That’s the part that is really weird.

I should add that I was running “zypper” in an “xterm”.

2

Good question.
That message is definitely not coming from zypper, because zypper doesn’t use Qt, nor would it try to connect to KWallet.
Did you run anything else in that xterm before running zypper?

It or a process it started might still be running in the background and printing debug messages from time to time.

(2) Why did “zypper” see that message as input (as if I had typed it). That’s the part that is really weird.

You didn’t press the middle mouse button by mistake maybe? That would paste the current X selection.
I can’t really think of anything else at the moment.

3

No. I assume that the message is somehow related to Kwallet.

At other times on that computer, I see the message when I start something that will invoke “kwallet”. The program that likely called “kwallet” then asks me directly for the info it should have got from “kwallet”, presumably because it thinks there was a “kwallet” error. Yet I still get the gpg-agent “pinentry” prompt for the key needed to open “kwallet”.

However, on this occasion I delayed doing anything needing “kwallet” for a while. And then “kwallet” was opened normally and was sitting open by the time this “xterm” was started.

Did you run anything else in that xterm before running zypper?

No.

It or a process it started might still be running in the background and printing debug messages from time to time.

At that time, “kwallet” was running in the background, but not connected to that terminal.

You didn’t press the middle mouse button by mistake maybe? That would paste the current X selection.
I can’t really think of anything else at the moment.

Again, no.

It is a slowish computer. So I expected “zypper dup” to take a little while. I entered the command, then went elsewhere for a while. When I came back, that message was on the screen. I hit enter to respond to the zypper prompt, and that’s when zypper reacted as if I had typed in the message.

It looks as if something is behaving a bit like malware – pumping lines into the input side of a pseudo-tty.

I can probably reproduce the QDBus message fairly easily, but maybe not the interaction with zypper. If I boot up, login to KDE on this box, then immediately run


ssh-add key < /dev/null

I’ll get that message. I run that from a yakuake terminal, and my shell startup files are such that “ksshaskpass” will look for the passphrase. I’ll get the pinentry popup to give my kwallet key and I’ll get the Ksshaskpass prompt for the ssh passphrase at about the same time, and the QDBus message will show up in yakuake.

For the particular case, I had delayed for a while before using “ssh-add”. And then when I did use “ssh-add”, it successfully got the key from “kwallet” (which is why I knew “kwallet” was open). And there was no QDBus message when I did that. It is possible that there was a delayed QDBus message related to that. However, it’s a bit of a mystery - other parts of KDE seem to look at “kwallet” in the background for reasons that I do not know (they don’t leave it open but I get the “pinentry” prompt).