Folks running and Debian, Ubuntu, etc. may be aware that Oracle has a Debian repository for Oracle Express and other open-source software.

If you weren’t aware of it and wanted to use it, here’s the magic line to add to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

Recently, my apt-get updates started printing this warning:


W: GPG error: http://oss.oracle.com unstable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2E2BCDBCB38A8516


because Oracle is signing their packages with GPG and my system didn’t have their GPG public key.

First, I tried:

$ gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv 2E2BCDBCB38A8516
gpg: requesting key B38A8516 from hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
gpgkeys: key 2E2BCDBCB38A8516 not found on keyserver
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
gpg: Total number processed: 0
$ gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys B38A8516
gpg: requesting key B38A8516 from hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
gpgkeys: key B38A8516 not found on keyserver
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
gpg: Total number processed: 0

No dice. So I poked around a bit and found Oracle’s RPM GPG key. I wondered if they used the same GPG key for their Debian packages as they did for their RPM packages. One way to find out:

$ wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle
...
13:50:04 (356.53 KB/s) - `RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle' saved [1744/1744]
$ sudo apt-key add RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle
OK
$ sudo aptitude update
...
Fetched 194B in 2s (94B/s)
Reading package lists... Done

Cool, it worked!