Any GPG / PGP experts on here?

[TangoEchoAlpha]

I could use some help please

I was previously running Manjaro and had my keys setup with GPG. The keys were stored in ~/.gnupg and I saved the private key to a Yubikey 5 NFC. As a precaution, I exported the private key and public key, then saved them as attachments inside a KeePass database.

Whenever I encrypted a file from the command line my Manjaro setup automatically read the public key from the key database in .gnupg - when I decrypted a file, Plasma would ask me to insert my Yubikey, I'd type in the user PIN and the private key would be read from the Yubikey.

I can't find my notes about how I set this up and I have changed distros to a Gnome based one, so I am trying to get my PGP keys working as before in a new setup, either with the command line or Seahorse.

I also have my old SSD so I have tried copying the .gnupg directory contents to my new ~/.gnupg directory, but this doesn't work.

Could anyone give me any pointers on how to import my keys and replicate my old setup?

Ta

EDIT: I have imported my keys now, trusted the old public key. Not sure how I now get GPG/Seahorse to allow me to use the Yubikey as the private key, at the moment the private key is in GPG and I have to enter the passphrase. I'd like to me able to insert the Yubikey and type in the user PIN?

 

[TangoEchoAlpha]

@lord filbuster Thanks for taking the time to reply. Was able to sort it by running:

gpg-connect-agent "scd serialno" "learn --force" /bye

Now when I list the private keys, the secret keys have a > to show they are on an external device. I think I will need to restart the GPG and scdaemon daemons for it to no longer use the private key in the local key ring?

 

[TangoEchoAlpha]

Yeah, I think so. I had to fudge it and force delete the private key on the local keyring, otherwise it just always tried to use the local key. I think the addkey command was supposed to delete the local key, but it never did for some reason. After I did that and ran the same command you did, I got the same result, with the key showing the yubikey serial and the >, and it worked flawlessly after restarting the daemons.

Thanks, after a reboot everything worked swimmingly. Had to insert my Yubikey and enter the user PIN - thanks again