I received a GPG-signed piece of email yesterday. This is no big deal, except that I didn't have anything set up on my machine to cope with it, so I took it as the opportunity to set up some crypto software on my machine.
I do this every so often, you see. I move to a new desktop machine, reinstall or upgrade the operating system and suddenly I have a blank page to configure the desktop experience. Over the years, I've become used to setting up the basics automatically - development tools, browser/email/messengers/etc, office apps and other necessities, but there are always things to do which aren't automatic because they are not used as often, and crypto software is one of those things.
So every year or so I get to investigate anew, see all the available software and decide on what to install and how to make it work. As usual, every time I set these things up it's in a different environment - now I'm using Linux (RedHat 9, to be precise), and I recently switched to Mozilla Thunderbird for mail.
Thankfully, even Linux projects are quite professional these days, so installation was painless, everything from RPMs or, for Firebird, from .xpis. This is what I installed:
Installing in that order should work fine. Run kgpg from the command line to create or import your keypairs, and you're done. Much simpler than when I first started experimenting with PGP back in '96 or so, back when using crypto software was more like a war (hence the title of this post).
This was all done from my work machine, so when I get home I'll replicate the process and then post my new collection of keys to gather dust for another year or so. :)
Posted by Dave at October 10, 2003 02:07 PM