KeePass on Linux. 2018 edition.

It’s been couple of years since I’ve switched to Linux. I’ve been running Ubuntu for most of these two years after having too many stability related issues with Mint. When I switched over from Windows I was missing one critical piece of software that, I believe, everyone should use – a password manager. I’ve been a long time user (many, many years) of KeePass, an open source password manager, that served me really well. With the switch to Linux I had to go through some fun of building a version of KeePassX from sources (more on that here). The software was OK, nothing to brag about. It’s a bit clumsy, a bit outdated, got some bugs. And, unfortunately, it seems as nobody really maintains it.

Fast forward to 2018 and I’ve almost fully switched to KeePassXC, which has a much better UI, more feature rich, has active members working on it. And I haven’t run into any bugs, yet. Hopefully the guys behind the project continue their great work and users such as myself can enjoy the software.

Installing KeePassX 2.x in Linux Mint

2018 Disclaimer: I’ve since switched to KeePassXC. More on that here.

It’s been a little while since I’ve started playing around with Linux Mint on my laptop. It took me very little time to install few major applications and all seemed good. Then I run into a situation which prompted me to convert my desktop to Linux. And this is where things started to get rough(er).

I decided that I want to install KeePassX 2.0.2 as a password manager onto my desktop. I’ve briefly tried to use KeePass2 which is available through the package manager, but quickly realized that it’s an older version and that getting a newer version requires me to trust someone out there who provides a binary. Well, not so keen on trusting unknown entities with a security piece of software. This is when I started looking at KeePassX, for which, unfortunately, the authors provide only sources and not the binaries that can be installed – that means you as an end user have to build it all yourself. It’s not a problem for anyone who’s been using Linux for a while, but a pain in the rear for a newcomer (even though I’ve been doing software for about 2 decades, haha).

Here I will provide you with instructions on how to get this all done. Hopefully it’ll be useful to someone out there.

  1. Install dependencies:
    sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake qtbase5-dev libqt5x11extras5-dev qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libgcrypt20-dev zlib1g-dev qt-sdk libxtst-dev libxi-dev checkinstall
  2. Figure out where you want to build the application (I used ~/Downloads folder)
    cd ~/Downloads
  3. Download the source
    wget https://www.keepassx.org/releases/2.0.2/keepassx-2.0.2.tar.gz
  4. Unpack the archive
    tar -xvf keepassx-2.0.2.tar.gz
  5. cd keepassx-2.0.2
  6. Create a directory in which the build files will be created
    mkdir build
  7. Switch into the build directory
    cd build
  8. Prepare to build the application. Make sure to have double dots at the end of the command!
    cmake ..
  9. Build the application
    make
  10. Use checkinstall tool to build .deb package and install it into the system
    sudo checkinstall
  11. The tool will ask you to set few options. Make sure to set the following values:
    • Maintainer: set this to your name/email
    • Summary: define brief package summary
    • Name: set the name of the application (this will be the name of the package in the end)
    • Version: set application version
    • Group: set to the group to which this application belongs to
    • Alternate source location: set this to the URL from which the source was downloaded
  12. Follow few next prompts. In the end the tool will create the .deb package and install the executable into /usr/local/bin and a .desktop file into /usr/local/share/applications.
    • You can use the .deb file that was created to install the application on any other machine if you’d like
  13. If you ever want to remove the package, use the following (keepassx is the Name value from #11 above):
    dpkg -r keepassx

Well, this should be it. Hopefully this is helpful.

Copyright © Alexander Yermakov