Although popular Dock application Docky is available in the repositories of Ubuntu 10.04 one of the most popular Docklets, for it, the GMail notifer docklet, doesn’t currently function in Lucid. Whilst entering your user credentials will result in a “successful validation” response, the Docklet itself is not able to connect to the GMail servers.
Not Docky’s fault
So what’s the beef? The issue is not a bug or regression on the part of Docky or the Docklet itself but rather a change in GNOME 2.30 – specifically gnome-keyring-sharp. This issue is also affecting many Adobe Air applications, too.
Robert Dyer, in a comment on the bug report for this issue mentions: –
The workaround would be us storing your password in clear-text. So… no.
As a result of the change, the ability to suitably address the issue is out of the Docky developers hands.
Thankfully the issue should hopefully be addressed in time for Lucid according to comments on the bug report.
Being aware of this issue for now will hopefully save both the developers a slew of invalid/duplicate bug reports and users a lot of hair pulling wondering why it won’t ‘just’ work.