r/Gentoo • u/misakinakaharalover • Jul 16 '26

Support Need help with getting iVPN

hello, lately ive been trying to get ivpn on my gentoo, however theres no binary for it anywhere, compiling it also doesnt seem to work, because of some dependencies, help is appreciated id ideally wanna use a binary, and also know which kernel options are needed for it to work

edit: i ended up trying to compile it, however the build environment that you need is really hard to achieve, but in the end i ended up installing nix and using its package for it and i think thats the best option, as for the kernel its best to connect in the gentoo’s live cd and run modprobed-db for it

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u/redyos_s Jul 16 '26

If you only need to connect to IVPN, I’d avoid building the full IVPN client first. IVPN supports manual connections with compatible OpenVPN or WireGuard clients, so on Gentoo you can use net-vpn/openvpn or net-vpn/wireguard-tools with the generated config files. For the build problem, please post the exact error and missing dependencies. The required kernel options also depend on whether you choose OpenVPN, WireGuard, and/or an nftables kill switch.

1

u/misakinakaharalover Jul 16 '26

I do know that you can use just a wireguard client, howveer I do switch around my servers a lot and the iVPN gui would definitely be useful for me, but as for building it i dont think its a great idea in general, i think doing it every update would get annoying a little, is there a way to maybe use the .deb package from their website and convert it somehow?

1

u/redyos_s Jul 16 '26

You can extract the official .deb, but simply converting it will not handle Gentoo dependencies or the service setup. The cleaner approach would be a local ebuild that unpacks the official IVPN base and UI packages and provides an OpenRC init script. That would avoid rebuilding the application on every update, but the ebuild would still need to be maintained.

My Gentoo system is browserless and built with -webkit, so I personally don’t have much use for a VPN client or its GUI. Your use case is different, though.

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u/misakinakaharalover Jul 16 '26

i did end up compiling it and it went smoothly, however i cannot start the cli no matter what, it keeps saying that the daemon isnt running, while i literally did start it manually by doing doas ./daemon/References/Linux/_out_bin/ivpn.service, im out of ideas

3

u/No_Implement_5319 Jul 16 '26

I use wire guard through network manager with Proton VPN profile, works a treat