So this year I have started to pay more attention to security. In particular I have started to work on securing my online accounts. Some of the steps I have taken to do this include:

1. Enabling 2 factor authentication where available.
2. Generating strong and unique passwords for each account.
3. Storing these passwords in a secure password vault.

For this third step there are a lot of different options, but I eventually narrowed these down to either the online password vault LastPass or the standalone KeePass application. While they both have good and bad points I eventually opted for KeePass simply because I believe that LastPass is a more tempting target for hackers than my own insignificant personal keepass file on my local machine.

This however presents a problem since the latest version of KeePass does not come with a linux installer. Fortunately we can get KeePass running on slackware with the help of some slackbuilds.

Order of install

In order to install KeePass we need to install Mono which in turn requires libgdiplus. So we end up with the following install order.

1. libgdiplus
2. Mono
3. KeePass

Install libgdiplus

To install libgdiplus run the following commands.

cd /[your downloads folder]
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/14.1/libraries/libgdiplus.tar.gz
tar xzf libgdiplus.tar.gz
cd libgdiplus
wget http://origin-download.mono-project.com/sources/libgdiplus/libgdiplus-2.10.9.tar.bz2
./libgdiplus.SlackBuild
cd /tmp
installpkg libgdiplus-2.10.9-i486-2_SBo.tgz

Install Mono

With libgdiplus installed we can now install mono. This part takes a long time so be prepared to go watch a movie or something.

cd /[your downloads folder]
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/14.1/development/mono.tar.gz
tar xzf mono.tar.gz
cd mono
wget http://download.mono-project.com/sources/mono/mono-3.2.3.tar.bz2
./mono.SlackBuild
cd /tmp
installpkg mono-3.2.3-i486-1_SBo.tgz

Install KeePass

We can now finally install KeePass.

cd /[your downloads folder]
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/14.1/misc/KeePass.tar.gz
tar xzf KeePass.tar.gz
cd KeePass
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/keepass/KeePass-2.15.zip
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/keepass/KeePass-2.15-Source.zip
./KeePass.SlackBuild
cd /tmp
installpkg KeePass-2.15-i486-1_SBo.tgz

Good to go

At this stage you should now be able to run keepass from your x desktop. In KDE just type KeePass into the search box and it should find the shortcut for you.

I must admit that while SlackBuild made it "relatively" easy to get everything running, I was disappointed that KeePass required so much work to get working. Linux is only going to gain in popularity in my opinion and it behooves an open source product to have a native linux installer that does not require jumping through so many hoops.