Fixing NO_PUBKEY 2E2BCDBCB38A8516 error from Oracle Debian repository

By Marc, on February 28th, 2007

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!

Zarla

3/9/2007 at 1:10 pm

Thanks a lot for this tips !

4/11/2007 at 12:47 am

Works! Thaks.

Jan

4/13/2007 at 1:55 am

I just found that oracle updated this page to include this information, too:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/install/xe-on-kubuntu.html

AnoN

4/17/2007 at 1:29 pm

Thanx!

Johnny cretzu

4/21/2007 at 3:32 pm

Thanks for the tip!

jojo maquiling

4/24/2007 at 9:36 pm

Thanks for this.

6/13/2007 at 6:37 am

Cool! It worked for me too!

Christian Olivares

8/22/2007 at 6:34 am

Thanks!!!! It worked for me!!!

DV Ramakrisnna

2/24/2008 at 5:19 am

Ya, it worked for me. thanks.

c.vo

3/6/2008 at 12:27 pm

awesomeness. this saved me a huge headache!

Malo

5/26/2008 at 2:43 am

Oke thanks verry much. it work for me.

Gordon

6/10/2008 at 7:42 am

Marc thanks very much for posting this tip!

Daniel

9/12/2008 at 9:48 am

You are great, thnx…

Confluence: Customer Solutions

9/15/2008 at 2:48 pm

Installing Oracle-xe – Ubuntu…

# Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file. The following should do the trick, from now on it’s assumed you know how to edit a text file. sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list Now add the following line: deb…