gnupg-agent installation

I ran into a little Ubuntu package installation quirk the other day. I wanted to install gpg-agent on a remote server. It's a headless server, so it doesn't have any window manager crap installed. gpg-agent has to be able to prompt you for keystore passphrases, and normally, it would pop up a window for that. So when I first tried to install gpg-agent, it said it would also have to install this alarming list of xwindows and GTK packages. Didn't want that.

What's actually going on is that gpg-agent just has a "pinentry" dependency. The default pinentry is is pinentry-gtk2, which of course depends on gtk and xwindows and all that. But there's also an curses (text mode) pinentry package that satisfies the dependency. That's what you'd want if you're ssh-ing into the machine. If that's already installed, gpg-agent won't ask for anything more.

So the commands are:

sudo apt-get install pinentry-curses
sudo apt-get install gnupg-agent