Mullvad Client 2021.5

Yannnd

I was very happy to discover that the Mullvad Linux client has become available in the Solus repos. Mullvad is one of the best VPN's, with very nice client software.

After installing it with sudo eopkg -v install mullvad I could find the application icon in the 'Internet' menu. After firing it up the Mullvad client window hung at 'Connecting to mullvad system service'. As expected, the mullvad-daemon wasn't running.

After some comparisons with my Debian system I found out that the Mullvad files got installed in /usr/share/mullvad, instead of /opt/Mullvad VPN/ as in Debian. The mullvad-daemon.service file wasn't even present in /etc/systemd/system

After firing the daemon by:
$ cd /usr/share/mullvad/resources $ sudo ./mullvad-daemon -v
the client accepted the Mullvad account token and ran fine.

I did the following:
First I edited the ExecStart line in /usr/share/usr/share/mullvad/resources/mullvad-daemon.service to: ExecStart=/usr/share/mullvad/resources/mullvad-daemon -v --disable-stdout-timestamps
Then copied the file to the systemd directory, enabled the service and started it:
$ sudo cp /usr/share/usr/share/mullvad/resources/mullvad-daemon.service /etc/systemd/system $ sudo systemctl enable mullvad-daemon.service $ sudo systemctl start mullvad-daemon.service
And everything worked fine.

I dropped this story here to be of first help if someone gets stuck the same way i did.

Also this is a request to the maintainer of the mullvad package to consider if the way of installing this software has to be changed.

Since a while version 2021.6 of the client is available, so an update of the repo would be very welcome too.

zmaint

I believe Qomui has a mullvad profile. I don't use it, but I think it was suggested to me a while back when I was thinking about getting a VPN (I'm still thinking about lol).

Found the link, along with the Reddit name of the person that is maintaining it.

And found this:
https://dev.getsol.us/D10878

Yannnd

zmaint
Thanks for your reply!

Indeed, Qomui seems to be a decent alternative, the features are quite comparable with those of the Mullvad client. Points of concern could be that according to https://github.com/corrad1nho/qomui the last update has been more than two years ago, and that the current version is a 0.x.x, which usually means that the developer has not yet decided it to be production-ready.

Besides that, the Mullvad client works excellently on Solus with the adjustments as described in my initial post. So I will wait a while for the maintainer of the Mullvad package to shed some light over my question.

riffer

Qomui didn't work with Mullvad when I tried it before the Mullvad App was available. No clue why.

Regardless, I picked this up from the forums or maybe github at some point and Mullvad works fine after I do this:

sudo systemctl start mullvad-daemon
sudo systemctl enable mullvad-daemon

After that you will get the login screen on the app and everything works normal including launch on startup etc.

A little simpler.

Yannnd

riffer

Thank you, you're right. Just executing:
$ sudo systemctl start mullvad-daemon $ sudo systemctl enable mullvad-daemon
on another Solus machine where I could do a clean install of the client, did the trick!

During my research I clearly got on the wrong track. /usr/lib/systemd/system/mullvad-daemon.service seems to be the systemd service file in use.

Probably this last step should be added to the install process...

riffer

Yannnd Yes. As someone who doesn't know much about this, I had managed to build the Mullvad app from source and just couldn't get it to work. If I'd known this at the time it would have worked fine.

If anyone can find the original post I pulled this info from please link it and give credit where credit is due.

Yannnd

riffer

Probably you found this?
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/557988-Mullvad-VPN-daemon-won-t-start-on-boot

If I'm right, the systemctl enable command takes care of creating a symlink to the right mullvad-daemon.service file so the daemon will run automatically at system boot.