Installing ExpressVPN on Manjaro » cyberfella ltd, since 2012.

The title of this post is deliberately misleading, but that’s for a good reason. The likelihood is, you are an ExpressVPN subscriber (the worlds most popular VPN service provider and arguably the best) and have just switched from Linux Mint to Manjaro, only to find that Fedora and Debian based distributions are always well catered for, but Arch Linux based distributions like Manjaro, well not so much.

The title is misleading since the solution to this immediate brick wall you’ve come up against, is to not install ExpressVPN at all – but still use it.

Enter OpenVPN. Installed already in Manjaro, and just waiting for you to perform a manual configuration. (Cue the groans)

In fact it is no more taxing that installing the regular fedora or debian pre-compiled packages and then entering your subscription code obtained by logging onto ExpressVPN’s website using your email address and password set up when you originally subscribed.

On the page where you can download the packages for many different devices and operating systems (except Arch Linux), there is a Manual Config option too. You can use this with OpenVPN.

Ensure OpenVPN is selected in the right-hand pane and expand your region at the bottom and choose from a list of ExpressVPN Servers for say, Europe and download the .ovpn file.

Now you can configure OpenVPN to use the ExpressVPN Server of your choice, with the following command…

You will be immediately prompted for your VPN Username and Password which you can copy and paste from the same ExpressVPN Manual Config page shown above.

You should see that a connection has been established. Just be sure to leave the terminal window open (maybe move it to a different workspace to keep it out of harms way if you’re a habitual window-closer like I am).

To close the VPN connection, just CTRL-C it in the Terminal window.

That’s it. But I’m always keen to give that little bit extra value, so I’ll continue, describing how you can also configure it using your Network Manager…

Right-click on your network icon in the bottom right hand corner (or ‘systray’ as the Windows folks would call it) and you’ll see there is an option to Add a VPN connection.

Select Import a saved VPN configuration – not OpenVPN!

Select your preferred .ovpn file downloaded from ExpressVPN’s site.

Copy and Paste the username and password from the ExpressVPN page…

Next, click on the Advanced… button.

Under the General tab, make sure to following boxes are checked:

Use custom gateway port: 1195
Use LZO data compression
Use custom tunnel Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU): 1500
Use custom UDP fragment size: 1300
Restrict tunnel TCP Maximum Segment Size (MSS)
Randomize remote hosts

Under the Security tab…