Newbie questions on installing Mullvad VPN, VeraCrypt, MDADM, Double Commander

General
1

Hi, Bluefin newbie here. I’m really excited that I’ve found Bluefin. I’ve been using Linux Mint for the past two years, but want to switch to Bluefin for increased stability and security. Most of my daily apps I have found on flathub and only four important apps remain. Maybe you can give me some advice and point me in the right direction for how to best install these and not messing too much with the basic principles of Bluefin:

  1. Mullvad VPN: I want to use the native app since the Blufin network manager doesn’t have some of the advanced features of the app (killswitch, split tunneling, ad blocker etc.). I got it working by layering it, but is there a better way, that also supports updating of the native app?

  2. VeraCrypt: I need to decrypt my data hard drive after the start of Bluefin. I got it working by layering it, but is there a better way? Updating is not as critical, but would be nice to have.

  3. MDADM: I need to install a Raid-5 which I did with mdadm on Linux Mint, but haven’t found any advice on how to install it on Silverblue/Bluefin. Brew doesn’t work. What ist the best approach here?

  4. Double Commander or Krusader: I’m used to working with twin panel file managers for decades and I don’t wanna miss this, but there are no flatpak apps for twin panel file managers or I haven’t found them yet? Brew works with Double Commander, but only on Mac?! I have the following download options for it: Double Commander / Wiki / Download - does any of these work with Bluefin?

So, can you give me any advice on how to get these apps working? Would be really appreciated. Thank you!

2

Nevermind, this is for Bluefin. Most of this isn’t supported and non-zfs RAID isn’t really my thing to answer. I apologize.

3

Concerning the RAID setup: BTRFS does not play well with several configurations of RAID. I am not sure if RAID5 is affected but you might look into this.

4

Thank you for both of your response.

By now I installed Mullvad VPN via rpm-ostree and included the repo so it gets updates.

VeraCrypt was installed the same way, but without updates since there’s no repo to be found.

For Double Commander I first tried installing it in a Fedora 39 box, which worked. But the box approach wasn’t suitable since I couldn’t open any files from within Double Commander (“unknown file type” or something like that). It seems I would need to define which app to use for a few dozen file types since Double Commander doesn’t see the apps outside the box? So that wasn’t very convenient and I installed it also via rpm-ostree.

As for MDADM I haven’t found time to experiment yet. If anyone else has advise on this, it’s very welcome. Thank you.

5

2, 3: It looks like you’ll have to layer these as distrobox can’t access disks, from what I can tell.

6

Thanks for the hint. By now I have discovered that mdadm is included with Bluefin. I can call it from the terminal, which is great. I just havn’t tried before :sweat_smile:

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7

From my side the topic can be marked as closed if there’s something like that around here? Thank you for your inputs :+1:

8

Hello, could you tell me how you added the repo for Mullvad VPN?

9

Sure. This is what worked for me:

  1. Download repo file from Index of /rpm/stable/ and copy it from download folder to /etc/yum.repos.d/ with sudo cp mullvad.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
  2. Install Mullvad VPN with rpm-ostree install mullvad-vpn
  3. After installing is finished reboot with systemctl reboot
  4. After reboot start Mullvad VPN service once with sudo systemctl enable --now mullvad-daemon

Hope, this helps. Best regards.

1 Like
10

I am done following your instructions and it looks good, thank you!

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