Straight Ornamental

debian keys

Posted by Graham Stratton Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:53:00 GMT

I just installed kanotix 2005-4, but when I came to install some new packages, I got a warning saying that the packages cannot be authenticated.

A bit of googling suggested that I needed to update the debian keys. This should easily be done with ‘apt-key update’, but that returned an error saying:

ERROR: Can’t find the archive-keyring Is the debian-keyring package installed?

I installed the package, but the error remained. It seems this is a bug in debian. Changing

ARCHIVE_KEYRING=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg

to

ARCHIVE_KEYRING=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

in /usr/bin/apt-key line 12

allowed me to run ‘apt-key update’, which downloaded 903 keys but then hung. But apt-get update still reported

E: Some packages could not be authenticated

and apt-get install still gave the error

The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F

gpg—keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net—recv-keys 2D230C5F

fetches the relevant key successfully.

It should then be possible to it them to the keychain with

gpg—armor—export 2D230C5F | apt-key add -

but that command returns

gpg: no writable keyring found: eof gpg: error reading `-’: general error gpg: import from `-’ failed: general error

Eventually I realised that this is an environment issue. If I ran these commands as root instead of using sudo, the keys can be added.