gpg on a 486/66 with Linux 2.0?

[Nelson Minar]

(I'm not on gnupg-users, please direct replies to me as well).

GnuPG is great, I'm really happy with it. Thanks to everyone who has
worked on it!

I've had some bad luck running gpg on an old 486/66 with Linux 2.0.36
and a Redhat 5.1 system. I couldn't generate a key at all, got stuck
in random number generation. And encrypting even short messages takes
a long time, maybe 20 or 30 seconds.

My guess is that this old machine doesn't have a good source of random
numbers, so gpg is having to work hard generating keys. Is that true?
Is this a /dev/random problem or a GnuPG problem? Could it be
documented or fixed? I know it's hard generating good random numbers,
but it'd be keen if gpg ran on embedded-class hardware.

                                                  nelson@media.mit.edu
.       .      .     .    .   .  . . http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/