[olug] Help w/ GnuPG freezing? (Enigmail, EGD, Perl, SHA1, etc.)

[K.J. Kirwan]

I hope someone can help me get GnuPG working.  

I have one of those $15 e-mail certs from Verisign, but
it is going to expire soon, and since I'm a big Mozilla fan, 
I thought I'd try Mozilla/Enigmail.  (Besides, I hate to give 
those Verisign weasels another nickel.)  

The Enigmail plug-in installed easily, and looks like it 
might work but it needs GnuPG.  GnuPG is installed, 
and it can report its version, but it freezes when trying 
to generate a key pair (gpg --gen-key) in a DOS window.  
(This is on a Win 2000 SP4 machine.  No booing please, LOL.)  

GnuPG works OK through collecting name, e-mail, etc., then the 
passphrase (two times).  After hitting return after entering the 
second passphrase, it erases the last entered line, then it's 
supposed to say something like "We need to generate a lot of 
random bytes. It is a good idea to perform some other action 
(type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the disks) 
during the prime generation; this gives the random number 
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.  "  

It never prints that message, this is when it freezes.  I let it 
run overnight once to make sure but it never came back.  

So someone in the IRC #gnupg channel thought it needed 
entropy and I should run EGD (Entropy Gathering Daemon).  
EGD is a Perl program which uses the SHA1 Perl module.  
So I installed both of these, and I still haven't been able to 
make GnuPG work.  Maybe I'm starting EGD wrong?: 

C:\gnupg>perl egd.pl c:\gnupg\entropy
bad source list: no sources at egd.pl line 377.

I have the Open Perl IDE installed and tried to debug, but I'm 
unfamiliar with these programs, and a Perl "llama" only.  

I'd be happy to forget about EGD and just "pound the keyboard 
and jiggle the mouse" while generating keys, but that doesn't 
seem to be getting the job done.  

I also tried installing GnuPG into CygWin to see if I could get 
GnuPG to work in a bash window.  It stalls in CygWin too, 
if that helps any.  

I'm lost, does anyone have any suggestions at this point?  
Thanks in advance for any help.  

Kim


P.S.: Here are some links: 

http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download.html#moz10
http://www.gnupg.org/
http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/documentation/howtos.html
http://egd.sourceforge.net/

--
K.J. Kirwan     <kjk_elec at ix.netcom.com>     (KJK Electronics)