How To Install paperkey on Ubuntu 22.04
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install paperkey on Ubuntu 22.04.
What is paperkey
paperkey is:
A reasonable way to achieve a long term backup of OpenPGP (GnuPG, PGP, etc) keys is to print them out on paper. The reasoning behind this is that paper and ink has amazingly long retention qualities - far longer than the magnetic or optical means that are generally used to back up computer data.
Due to metadata and redundancy, OpenPGP secret keys are significantly larger than just the “secret bits”. In fact, the secret key contains a complete copy of the public key. Since the public key generally doesn’t need to be escrowed (most people have many copies of it on various keyservers, web pages, etc), only extracting the secret parts can be a real advantage.
Paperkey extracts just those secret bytes and prints them. To reconstruct, you re-enter those bytes (whether by hand or via OCR) and paperkey can use them to transform your existing public key into a secret key.
There are three methods to install paperkey on Ubuntu 22.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install paperkey Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install paperkey using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install paperkey
Install paperkey Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install paperkey using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install paperkey
Install paperkey Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install paperkey using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install paperkey
How To Uninstall paperkey on Ubuntu 22.04
To uninstall only the paperkey package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove paperkey
Uninstall paperkey And Its Dependencies
To uninstall paperkey and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 22.04, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove paperkey
Remove paperkey Configurations and Data
To remove paperkey configuration and data from Ubuntu 22.04 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge paperkey
Remove paperkey configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove paperkey configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge paperkey
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install paperkey package on Ubuntu 22.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.
