GPG (or PGP) Encryption

I did a lot of searching and experimenting before I learned this one (thanks to rww on IRC). I used to use PGP in Windows for email and file encryption. Ubuntu is open-source and so is GPG (GnuPG), so I thought Ubuntu would have great support for GPG. Well, it appeared to at first. It comes with a password management application called Seahorse, which has some things in it about GPG keys. However, I could never get it to work with my old PGP keys, and I couldn't figure out how to encrypt and decrypt files from the GUI. I really wanted the ability to easily encrypt or decrypt the clipboard, but I finally decided that was just asking too much.

It turns out there is a package called seahorse-plugins that for some reason is not installed by default but is required for all this GPG stuff to work. I think it used to be called gedit-plugins several distributions ago, but that package no longer exists.

So, install it with:

sudo aptitude install seahorse-plugins

Then, to add the clipboard capabilities, right click on a panel, choose "Add to Panel," and choose "Clipboard Text Encryption" applet.