Albrechts Blog

from time to time I’ll report some stories about software I’m currently using/configuring etc.

Thunderbird on Ubuntu Hardy and OpenPGP card

Again, after upgrading from Dapper to Hardy final version my FSFE card and thunderbird (now at 2.0) mail signing stopped working together. The card worked perfectly from the commandline (pcsc_scan or gpg –card-status) even the CardStatus display in thunderbird worked, just no signing, complaining about “no card found”.

Today I discovered the reason:

The last few lines of

/etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent

check for an already running gpg-agent, and strangely because seahorse-agent (the gnome password manager) is running it doesn’t start gpg-agent!

So just comment out the if/fi construct with that check, and it works again!

--- /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent.orig 2009-01-27 23:06:07.000000000 +0100
+++ /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent 2009-01-27 21:32:55.000000000 +0100@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@

 # Invoking gpg-agent with no arguments exits successfully if the agent
 # is already running as pointed by $GPG_AGENT_INFO
- if ! $GPGAGENT 2>/dev/null; then
+ ##if ! $GPGAGENT 2>/dev/null; then
    STARTUP="$GPGAGENT --daemon --sh --write-env-file=$PID_FILE $STARTUP"
- fi
+ ##fi fi