[solved] gpg no pinentry

[gostal]

Today I discovered that I can no longer decrypt gpg encrypted file. This is what I get:

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gpg -d pinkoder.txt.asc
gpg: encrypted with 2048-bit ELG key, ID E922C8FF45DC1ACD, created 2005-03-01
      "Gösta Ljungdahl (foi) <gostal@foi.se>"
gpg: public key decryption failed: No pinentry
gpg: decryption failed: No secret key

I have reinstalled pinentry-0.8.1, pinentry-gtk-0.8.1 and gnupg2-2.0.22 to no avail and I certainly have the private key:

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gpg --list-secret-keys
/home/gostal/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
-------------------------------
sec#  dsa1024 2005-03-01 [SC]
      ...
uid           [ultimate] Gösta Ljungdahl (foi) <gostal@foi.se>
uid           [ultimate] Gösta Ljungdahl (FOI standard) <gostal@foi.se>
uid           [ultimate] Gösta Ljungdahl (Residence) <goslju@gmail.com>
ssb   elg2048 2005-03-01 [E]

What's going on here? Please help!

Edit: Tried a few things like changing the pinentry program in ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf but it didn't have any effect so eventually I got to the windows standard trick when programs don't work that is I rebooted the machine and that was all it took. Likely I could have avoided rebooting if only I had known which processes are involved but the gpg man pages weren't all that transparent.