I am unable to generate a gpg key through the keyring program

Question

Whenever I try to generate a gpg key through the system's GPG program, it asks for my name, email, and password then everything except for the GPG program's main window disappears.

Upon using gpg key-gen

gpg: can't open `/home/jesse/.gnupg/random_seed': Permission denied
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.
gpg: WARNING: some OpenPGP programs can't handle a DSA key with this digest size
+++++++++++++++..++++++++++...+++++++++++++++.+++++..+++++.+++++.++++++++++.+++++++++++++++..+++++.++++++++++++++++++++.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.+++++.+++++.+++++...+++++>+++++...+++++++++++++++++++++++++..+++++++++++++++>.+++++>+++++................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................>.+++++.................................................................................................................+++++

Not enough random bytes available.  Please do some other work to give
the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 300 more bytes)
gpg: no writable public keyring found: eof
Key generation failed: eof
gpg: note: random_seed file not updated

Solution 1

For me, deleting the .gnugpg folder helped:

sudo rm -rf ~/.gnugpg

Solution 2

Permissions might be wrong after you ran gpg from root, making it impossible to modify one/some of the files as ordinary user "joey".

find ~/.gnupg -type d -exec sudo chown joey:joey {} \; -exec chmod 700 {} \;
find ~/.gnupg -type f -exec sudo chown joey:joey {} \; -exec chmod 600 {} \;

In case case you don't want to delete any existing keys, this will be helpful.

Comments

[Wayne Len]

That is what eventually worked for me. I must have forgotten to come back and put the answer here. Thank you for your response.

[Danny van der Knaap]

This didn't worked for me on 17.10

[Pablo Bianchi]

Sockets present on that location also should be owned by $USER:$USER? You can just use $USER:$USER, your current user.