PIA in Encrypted Home Directory

Upon getting Linux Mint installed, I went ahead with installing VPN by Private Internet Access. Went through the same motions as usually albeit now with slightly different result - it wouldn't connect.

Looking at logs ($HOME/.pia_manager/log/openvpn.log) just gave cryptic errors:

SIOCSIFADDR: Operation not permitted
: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFDSTADDR: Operation not permitted

Quick search on internet brought me to Linux Mint forum where exactly the same problem was described. And familiarity didn't stop there; author had one other similarity - encrypted home folder. Sounded like a perfect fit so I killed PIA client and went with slightly modified procedure:

Terminal  Copy
sudo mkdir /home/pia
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /home/pia
mv ~/.pia_manager /home/pia/.pia_manager
ln -s /home/pia/.pia_manager ~/.pia_manager

However, this didn't help. Still the same issue in my log files. So I decided to go with atomic option. First I killed PIA client (again) and removed PIA completely together with all my modifications:

Terminal  Copy
rm ~/.pia_manager
sudo rm ~/.local/share/applications/pia_manager.desktop
rm -R /home/pia

With all perfectly clean, I decided to start with fresh directory structure, exactly the same as in the original solution:

Terminal  Copy
sudo mkdir -p /home/pia/.pia_manager
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /home/pia
ln -s /home/pia/.pia_manager ~/.pia_manager

With directory in place I repeated installation of PIA client:

Terminal  Copy
cd ~/Downloads
tar -xzf pia-v72-installer-linux.tar.gz
./pia-v72-installer-linux.sh

And it worked! :)