gnupg privicy assistant - card manager.

[Werner Koch]

On Sun, 31 Aug 2014 16:00, paul.lewis at quadensemble.com said:

> I'd like to use the card manager function, but whenever I invoke it the 
> application returns the error "Error accessing the card", and the 
> status bar reports "Checking for card .. "

I have actually thank you for raising this issue:

> gnome-keyring-daemon[5531]: unrecognized command: SCD

The problem is that the gnome-keyring-dameon hijacks the inter process
communication (IPC) between gpg and gpg-agent.  It implements a very
limited set of commands of gpg-agent but nothing more.  Recent versions
of GnuPG detect this and show a warning message or pop-up to tell you
just this.

Depending on the version of gnome-keyring-daemon, it is possible to
disable the gpg-agent hijacking component.  Unfortunately it is hard to
convince the maintainer to disable this mis-features.

> Otherwise if I run gpg --card-status with a card in the USB card reader 
> I get the following:

You are using gpg 1.4.x which can directly talk to the card.  However,
latest card features are not supported by 1.4 but only by GnuPG 2.x.

See the mail thread starting with this mail for details:

 http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2014-August/028689.html

> I presume, the system is misconfigured is some way. Any one got any 
> suggestions?

You may want to bring this to the attention of your Linux distribution.
The solution could be easy: The gpg-agent component needs to be disabled
when build gnome-keyring-daemon:

  ./configure --disable-gpg-agent 


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner

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