Delta XMPP Project

For whatever reason, the ca-certificates package of Debian/Ubuntu does not contain the StartCom root certificate. This may have changed by the time you read this article, but otherwise you’ll probably want to add this root yourself. Here is how to do it the “right way”.

First, securely get a hold of the StartCom root certificate. One easy way to do this is to use Firefox 2.0 to visit this page, and right-click save-as on the StartCom Root CA link. It is important that you save-as on the file, because otherwise Firefox will try to import the CA into its own storage and not actually save it to a file like you want. It seems like it would be even simpler to just extract the StartCom root from Firefox’s own storage, since it is already present on your local machine, but I can’t figure out how to do that. Save the file as startcom.crt.

Next:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/ca-certificates/startcom
sudo cp startcom.crt /usr/share/ca-certificates/startcom/
sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates

In the reconfigure application, choose Ask mode, and select the startcom certificate to have it enabled. You might also take this moment to disable the weird CAs in there. I have no idea how or why Debian decided to trust the CAs that they do. Personally, I enable only the mozilla certs and the startcom cert.

That’s all! StartCom is installed. Now it should work with Psi and Subversion, among other programs.

(Credit to Ralf Hildebrandt for the dpkg-reconfigure hint.)