With some help from IRC the problem could be narrowed down to pinentry. My setup so far involved a VNC session and the only pinentry package installed was "pinentry-gnome3". What works for me is pinentry-gtk2, for instance.
Using VNC: * pinentry-gnome3: "Operation cancelled" (why?) * pinentry-gtk2: works! * pinentry-qt: Other, VNC+qt4 specific bug * pinentry-curses: "Permission denied" (why?) Using ssh: * pinentry-gnome3: Permission denied (obviously,needs X11) * pinentry-gtk2: Permission denied (obviously, needs X11) * pinentry-qt: Permission denied (obviously, needs X11) * pinentry-curses: Permission denied (why?) Using ssh with X-forwarding (ssh -X): * pinentry-gnome3: Operation cancelled (why?) * pinentry-gtk2: works! * pinentry-qt: works! * pinentry-curses: Permission denied (why?) So I'll be using pinentry-gtk2 for now which reduces the severity of this bug for me. But the error message gnupg displays is a little confusing and does not indicate to the user that s/he should maybe try installing an alternative (non-broken?) pinentry package. Regards, Linus PS: And with switching to pinentry-gtk2 I also had to add a "set pgp_use_gpg_agent=yes" to my muttrc to avoid being asked for a password twice (once within mutt and once in the pop-up).
