Install and configure Pulse Secure on Ubuntu

VPN’s are very common solutions in a day to day life. VPNs are used to access a company’s internal resources, connect to virtual datacenters on public cloud providers or protect home internet connectivity. Every modern VPN solution has a variety of operating systems supported starting from Windows and MacOS ending up at Linux distros mobile systems (Android or Apple iOS).

One of the most popular Linux distributions is Ubuntu. Below you can find a quick tutorial on how to install and configure Pulse Secure VPN client on Ubuntu 18.04.

Download VPN client package on local disk. Pulse Secure has .deb package format. I will use dpkg (Debian native package management tool) to install VPN client. From a console run:
NOTE: below command is for 64 bit client

dpkg -i ./ps-pulse-linux-9.0r3.0-b923-ubuntu-debian-64-bit-installer.deb

At the end of the console output, you will get information that dependencies need to be installed. Run below command to install dependencies.
NOTE: below command is for 64 bit client

sudo  /usr/local/pulse/PulseClient_x86_64.sh install_dependency_packages

Export VPN client library path

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/pulse

You are ready to start VPN client. Go to applications and look for Pulse Secure

If for any reason applet does not start, go to console and try to start UI applet from console (see example below). The most common error is libgnome-keyring.so.0 library is missing.

artur@artur-nuc:~/Downloads# /usr/local/pulse/pulseUi
/usr/local/pulse/pulseUi: error while loading shared libraries: libgnome-keyring.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It can be fixed really quick by running apt install command and install missing library, see below

sudo apt install libgnome-keyring0

Go back to application list and try to start UI applet again