GPG4WIN 3.0 Windows XP Support

Gpg4win help-en
1

Just wondering if XP is supposed to be supported or not. According to the documentation and description it is but the installer says no. Kleopatra also crashes so was curious.

Thanks

2

Dear Mark,

we want Gpg4win to be able to run on XP (even if Microsoft does not support XP anymore, so you should be very aware that an XP installation is likely to be vulnerable to attackers. But yes, there may be very old or offline machines where Gpg4win is useful and an upgrade to a newer Microsoft or GNU/Linux operating system is not feasable).

If you have problems on XP, it could be a technical defect. We appreciate if you would report such problems (and give use some information how to reproduce it like the precise version numbers of Gpg4win and Windows, language and the actions you have to do to reproduce the problem.)

Best Regards,
Bernhard

3

It seems we may have a defect on XP and Vista. We will investigate further.
Thanks for asking!

4

Thanks. I’ll keep my eye out for a fixed version.

5

Dear Mark,

after investigating a bit, I’ll have to correct my initial answer:
Right now we support Windows versions 7 or newer.

So we do not have support for XP or Vista right now. (Both did run out of extended support from Microsoft meanwhile.)

See https://dev.gnupg.org/T3425 the reason is that the latest Qt does not come
with support for XP and Vista anymore.

I’ve also adapted the web page for system requirements:
https://www.gpg4win.org/system-requirements.html
(You can use parts of Gpg4win on XP and Vista, but you would need to use a different
pinentry and GPA. I haven’t tested this, experiences from others are welcome.)

Thanks again for asking your question, we haven’t been clear on this point before.

Best Regards,
Bernhard

6

Bernhard,

Thanks for checking this out and the explanations. I know XP has been long dead but with Thunderbird still stuck in the 32bit world I still use an old PC just for mail.

I reverted back to the previous version of GPG4Win but if you ever decide to test future builds for XP compatibility, I’d be interested in trying it out.

Thanks,
Mark

7

Hi Mark,

thanks for your feedback and for willing to test!

You can probably use Gpg4win 3.0.0 on XP with Thunderbird,
if you configure the gpg-agent to use a different pinentry version.
This should be configurable the gpg-agent.conf file, but I did not confirm this.

Best Regards,
Bernhard

8

I added additional notes to the Gpg4win 3.0 Release that explain how the get Gpg4win 3.0 in Windows XP and Vista working: https://wiki.gnupg.org/Gpg4win/releases/3.0/notes

9

Hello, Jochen.

Could you please correct the inaccuracy on this webpage https://wiki.gnupg.org/Gpg4win/releases/3.0/notes

Wrong: pinentry-gtk2.exe
Correctly: pinentry-gtk-2.exe

Thank you.

10

I’ve fixed the name and simplified the instructions by suggesting to rename pinentry-gtk-2 instead of having to edit the configuration.