Newbie guide to using tailscale

General
1

How do I use Tailscale on Bluefin?

I’m familiar using it on Windows but not Linux. I see at https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/tailscale-vpn-on-bluefin/ that it’s included out of the box, and I can see it in the Tray items at top right. However clicking on it doesn’t seem to do anything. The status goes blue for a few moments and then back to grey.

As that topic advises, I’ve run sudo tailscale set --operator=$USER but that doesn’t seem to change anything.

The end of the topic said there is a bug at Bluefin 40, which is my version I think, but the bug was closed 8 months ago.

The administrators guide Administrator's Guide | Bluefin using Mullvad or Docker looks to be a pretty deep dive. Is that really necessary?

❯  rpm-ostree status
State: idle
AutomaticUpdates: stage; rpm-ostreed-automatic.timer: last run 3 days ago
Deployments:
  ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin-dx:gts
                   Digest: sha256:c9c13cedbc68d8e490d9efdd406036231db5a2bda13cf8deec47abd21925d34c
                  Version: gts-40.20250115 (2025-01-15T01:08:05Z)
                     Diff: 400 upgraded, 39 removed, 53 added

● ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin-dx:gts
                   Digest: sha256:470b3d5df16f2f11976723eb3771637b0da35e45abd13b4e1d1c42abf97b2991
                  Version: gts-40.20241124 (2024-11-24T06:03:12Z)

Thanks

2

Opening a terminal and running

tailscale up

…resulted in a tailscale login URL. After doing that the Tailscale tray control works as expected, turning the VPN on and off, and showing participating devices when on.

This is a really simple fix and should be in the docs somewhere (along with the –operator setting). I’d open a PR with it but am still getting familiar with how this project is organized. (I haven’t seen a place yet for individual app advice).

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