GNUpg

[Ralph Sanford]

On Sun, 2002-07-07 at 12:01, stayler wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> I am looking at building and playing with GNUpg along with Sylpheed
> (this is mylatest attempt to move my email from OS/2 to Linux).  I am
> having trouble getting to the GNUpg.org site to get the latest tarball.
>  
> 
> I would be interested in commentary from the group about the pros and
> cons  of GNUpg.  Also if there are mirror sites where the tarball can
> be obtained.
> 
> stayler
> 
GPG (GNUpg) is similar to command line PGP.  If you have gpg installed
on your system, then as user type "gpg" to set up to be used as a user.

You would need to change some options in gpg for compatibility with PGP
2.x.  I have not had problems between gpg and PGP v 5, 6 and 7.  PGP is
in the process of being allowed to die by its current owner Network
Associates.  GNUpg is still under active development.

Moving from OS/2 PGP to Linux gpg the differences that you will notice
are:
OS/2 PGP is stuck at v 5.5 and has been for what? 4 years?  Linux with
gpg is under ongoing development with a couple of fixes per year.  I
believe that gpg is compatible with OpenPGP.

OS/2 did not have a functional GUI interface for use with PGP (at least
not a year ago when I left).  Linus has GPA, Geheimnis, Seahorse,
others?  These are not as smooth as the windows PGP GUI, but nearly as
functional.

As I recall, all OS/2 email clients handled PGP encryption and signing
and most Linux email clients also handle this.  Only PMMail/2 did a good
job of handling encrypted attachments.  I have had poor results with GUI
Linux email clients handling encrypted attachments.  Evolution has
claims to be RFC compliant, and it may be, however it can not be used to
send encrypted attachments to those other legacy email clients like
Outlook, PMMail, Eudora, Pegasus.   

To copy OS/2 PGP keys to Linux gpg I did the following.  From the HPFS
copy secring.skr and pubring.pkr to a fat partition.  Within Linux as
user type "gpg" to set up a directory ".gnupg".  Copy the files
secring.skr and pubring.pkr to the directory ".gnupg".  Rename the files
to secring.gpg and pubring.gpg.  You will need to change the trust of
each key (using command line or GUI wrapper).

Once I went through the effort to set up gpg, I have had no issues or
compatibility problems with PGP, except for sending encrypted
attachments using GUI mail clients.

Recognizing that you specifically asked about tarballs, why not use the
gpg.rpm that likely came with your distro? 


-- 
Ralph Sanford       -       If your government does not trust you,
rsanford at telusplanet.net   -   should you trust your government?

GPG/PGP ID   -   0x7A1BEA01