(gnupg.info)Installation

---

Next: Invoking GPG-AGENT Prev: Top Up: Top

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

1 A short installation guide
****************************

Unfortunately the installation guide has not been finished in time.
Instead of delaying the release of GnuPG 2.0 even further, I decided to
release without that guide.  The chapter on gpg-agent and gpgsm do
include brief information on how to set up the whole thing.  Please
watch the GnuPG website for updates of the documentation.  In the
meantime you may search the GnuPG mailing list archives or ask on the
gnupg-users mailing list for advise on how to solve problems or how to
get that whole thing up and running.

   ** Building the software

   Building the software is described in the file 'INSTALL'.  Given that
you are already reading this documentation we can only give some extra
hints.

   To comply with the rules on GNU systems you should have build time
configured 'gnupg' using:

     ./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

   This is to make sure that system wide configuration files are
searched in the directory '/etc' and variable data below '/var'; the
default would be to also install them below '/usr/local' where the
binaries get installed.  If you selected to use the '--prefix=/' you
obviously don't need those option as they are the default then.

   ** Notes on setting a root CA key to trusted

   X.509 is based on a hierarchical key infrastructure.  At the root of
the tree a trusted anchor (root certificate) is required.  There are
usually no other means of verifying whether this root certificate is
trustworthy than looking it up in a list.  GnuPG uses a file
('trustlist.txt') to keep track of all root certificates it knows about.
There are 3 ways to get certificates into this list:

   * Use the list which comes with GnuPG. However this list only
     contains a few root certificates.  Most installations will need
     more.

   * Let 'gpgsm' ask you whether you want to insert a new root
     certificate.  This feature is enabled by default; you may disable
     it using the option 'no-allow-mark-trusted' into 'gpg-agent.conf'.

   * Manually maintain the list of trusted root certificates.  For a
     multi user installation this can be done once for all users on a
     machine.  Specific changes on a per-user base are also possible.