cloud 9 blog

we are running keepass to store our password for servers, weblogins and anything that has a password. now a while ago we started using keepass version 1. it was light and linux had version 1 in the repositories of the distros. then we decided to move over to version 2 as it had way more functionality that we would use. linux doesn’t have version 2 in the repositories.

now keepass is originally a windows program and the developers have been developing it for mobile phones, gaming consoles, etc. this all works great on version 1. but version 2, no.

when i first tried to get keepass v2 working i tried it with wine. it installed fine and also the portable version ran fine. but when you loaded the password database, it would crash. but creating a new database file worked no problems. we were not about to redo EVERYTHING into a new database file. that is just too much hassle. no matter what i tried, i could not get it to run on wine properly. so i gave up, for the time being. i ended up installing virtualbox with a windows xp virtual machine and just run keepass from there. dirty i know, but what can one do?

then someone mentioned something called Mono (cross platform, open source .NET development framework). firstly when i checked this out i was like, such a mission and couldn’t get it working properly, until today i dedicated an hour (which turned into 3 hours) to try and get this working.

for ubuntu or any other similar distros (debian, linux mint)
what i did was:

apt-get install mono-devel monodevelop monodoc mono-gmcs mono-gac mono-utils monodevelop monodoc-browser monodevelop-nunit monodevelop-versioncontrol

once that is done change to your directory where keepass is (in my case i downloaded the portable version)

then i ran

mono KeePass.exe

it started keepass BUT it didn’t show any words or characters.

i searched google some more and found out that xserver-xorg-video-intel needs to be upgraded. my version was 2.9.0 (default install) and this had to be upgraded to 2.9.1

all you do is add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list (i’m not running the latest ubuntu yet)

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

then do

apt-get update

followed by

apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel

then i think i rebooted and once it was rebooted i ran a mono KeePass.exe and walla! KeePass V2 under linux!

if any of you actually do use keepass and having trouble, don’t be shy to ask for help!