help needed getting gnupg to function correctly in linux

[Philip Jackson]

Thank you Bernhard for your reply :

On 20/06/14 09:03, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 June 2014 at 19:04:16, Philip Jackson wrote:
>> It appears to me (in all my ignorance) that there is a problem connected
>> with gpg-agent and PINentry.   The Synaptic Package Manager shows that I
>> have gnupg-agent v.2.0.22-3ubuntu1 installed.
> 
> Check if you have a functional pinentry package installed.
> It may come in an extra package, e.g. try to install 
> pinentry-qt4
> 
> A simple test if pinentry works:
> 
> pinentry
> OK Your orders please
> getpin
> D asdf
> OK
> bye
> OK closing connection

I checked using the entries above and get exactly what you quoted.  So does this
mean that pinentry is working ok ?

Checking with Synaptic package manager shows that both pinentry-qt4 and
pinentry-gtk2 are installed.  Notes in the package manager say that the qt4
version is especially for users of KDE4 and that the gtk2 version is especially
suitable for users of Gnome.

It seems to me that UbuntuStudio is Gnome based but when I check the version :

pinentry --version  on my pc returns
pinentry-qt4 (pinentry)


> 
> 
> Next check if your agent can do it.
>   gpg-agent
> 

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "....can do it'

gpg-agent  returns
gpg-agent: gpg-agent running and available

and it's version 2.0.22

when I look in the gpg-agent.conf file, there are only 2 settings and these are
for cache size and max cache.
Should there be other entries telling the agent how and what to do ?

Where should I go from here ?

Philip