Not enough random bytes available.

Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need more bytes)

I decided to upgrade pacman on Arch Linux recently. I was advised to run [sudo] pacman-key --init after the update had finished. Sounds simple enough, just one extra command I need to copy -> paste to get me going again. Wrong. It turns out gpg will go about generating a very strong key (did not investigate the exact key size). On my not-so-busy machine it would just sit there doing (what would appear as) nothing for hours. To generate entropy, /dev/random is used. I started:

$ cat /dev/random

in a remote session and there was nothing printed on-screen, e.g., nothing was being generated, e.g., no entropy, e.g., no gpg joy. What follows is a very ugly hack to speed things up. Keep the above remote connection open and connect to the machine in a separate tab/window. Start pacman-key as instructed earlier. Leave the window/tab open and connect again, in a third, separate window/tab. Repeat (many) times:

$ ls -R /
$ [sudo] sync
$ sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches <<< 3

Ugly, I know.