Rolling Resource

Step 1 - Download source

The first thing we need to do is download the source file from GnuPG.  I like to download the files directly to my server rather than downloading them to my PC and then uploading them to my server, so lets use a SSH session.  There are plenty of SSH Clients available, but PuTTY is available for free and does the job.  Instructions for configuring PuTTY for Westhost are available here.  Once you have logged in, create a directory to download your files to (for example, apps/dl) using the mkdir
[mylogin][~]$mkdir apps
[mylogin][~]$mkdir apps/dl

The files we need are only available via FTP from GnuPG.  If you clicked on the link to their site above, you will have found the latest version - at the time of writing this is 1.4.5.  Hover your mouse over the FTP link and you will find that the file we want to download is located at ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2, that is to say the file gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2 is located on the server called ftp.gnupg.org in the directory gcrypt/gnupg Follow the example below to download your own copy (user input is in bold).  It is good practice to download the signature file gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2.sig as well. 

If you prefer, you can download the gzipped file gnupg-1.4.5.tar.gz instead of gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz.  You do not need both sets, although I download them in the example below.  GZip is just an older piece of software.  The command to extract the files would be gunzip instead of bunzip2

Step 2 - Checking the download

Now that we have the source files on our server, we need to check that they have not been tampered with.  The simplest way is to issue the command bunzip2 -t gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2

[mylogin][~/apps/dl]$ bunzip2 -tv gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2
gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2: ok

However, this only checks that the archive is not corrupt.  You really need to check the file’s digital signature, but we don’t have any means to do that yet.  We can verify the checksum but GnuPG only publish the SHA1 checksum for the code and we do not have sha1sum installed on our server.  However, I can reveal that the MD5sum is

811525965b4c0987e6418a7729a6444d gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2

If you save this text to the file gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2.md5, then enter md5sum -c gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2.md5 on the command line, you should get this response

[mylogin][~/apps/dl]$ md5sum -c gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2.md5
gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2: OK

If there was a problem with your download, you will get the following error message when testing the archive

bunzip2: gnupg-1.4.5.md5: data integrity (CRC) error in data

You can use the `bzip2recover’ program to attempt to recover
data from undamaged sections of corrupted files.

Step 3 - Other libraries

We need to download and install the libcurl, libiconv and gettext libraries before we can build GnuPG.  Also, since we do not have root access at Westhost, we need to tell all Linux packages to install to a different directory other than /usr/local.  We do this by specifying

./configure --prefix=/usr/mylocal
NOTE: Create the directory /usr/mylocal if it does not already exist

libiconv and gettext depend on each other, so we need to build libiconv then gettext and the rebuild libiconv.

Build libcurl

wget http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.16.0.tar.bz2
wget http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.16.0.tar.bz2.asc
bunzip2 -c curl-7.16.0.tar.bz2 | tar x
cd curl-7.16.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/mylocal
make
make install
cd ..


Build libiconv

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.11.tar.gz
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.11.tar.gz.sig
gunzip -c libiconv-1.11.tar.gz | tar x
cd libiconv-1.11
./configure --prefix=/usr/mylocal
make
make install
cd ..


Build gettext

ftp mirrors.usc.edu
 anonymous
 anon@
 cd pub/gnu/gettext
 mode image
 passive
 get gettext-0.16.tar.gz
 get gettext-0.16.tar.gz.sig
 quit
gunzip -c gettext-0.16.tar.gz |tar x
cd gettext-0.16
./configure --prefix=/usr/mylocal
make
make install


Rebuild libiconv

cd ../libiconv-1.11
make distclean
./configure --prefix=/usr/mylocal
make
make install
libtool --dry-run --finish /usr/mylocal/lib
libtool --finish /usr/mylocal/lib
cd ..


Step 4 - Creating the Executable

bunzip2 -c gnupg-1.4.5.tar.bz2 |tar x
cd gnupg-1.4.5
./configure --prefix=/usr/mylocal
make
make install


Once you have built GnuPG, you will need to create a few links as our directory is not in the PATH.

ln -s /usr/mylocal/bin/gpg /usr/local/bin/gpg

Alternatively, edit the PATH definition in /.bashrc to include /usr/mylocal/bin

You will also need to copy the configuration file
mkdir ~/.gnupg
cp -p /usr/mylocal/share/gnupg/options.skel ~/.gnupg/options