In GNOME 3.4 (Fedora 17), GNOME Online Accounts (GOA) worked great with Google two-factor authentication (you really should enable that, if you value your data). In GNOME 3.6 (Fedora 18) it works no more, and it might be fixed in GNOME 3.8. When developers break some existing functionality for the sake of “progress”, but don’t bother fixing it or providing an alternative way before an official release, I always feel a bit… disenchanted.
Fortunately you can work around the broken code.
- Open Seahorse, filter your passwords for “GOA”, you should see one or two items of “Gnome Online Accounts password” type. Delete them.
- Re-login to Gnome session.
- Open Online Accounts and log in to your Google account. It will fail.
- Create an application-specific password for your Google account in the web browser.
- Open Seahorse, filter your password for “GOA”, you should see a single item. Open it and display the password. It will be very long, find the following section:
'password': <'your_password'>
. - Replace your_password with your application-specific password you’ve generated.
- Close Seahorse and re-login to your Gnome session.
- Online accounts should work now. It worked for me.
It would be really nice if we didn’t have to fix this stuff by hand. Every time I upgrade I have to do lots of these kinds of magic fixes. In Fedora 18, this was one of the minor issues. The big issues still await me.