Our guide below applies to at least Debian 13 / Trixie and more recent releases with or without a desktop environment. The direction are on how to connect to our PenguinVPN 2.0 Service using OpenVPN and a terminal rather than via use of a graphical desktop environment and network manager. If you need updated documentation for a newer release contact support.
1. If you don't yet have a subscription to our PenguinVPN 2.0 service you'll need to get a subscription.
2. When placing an order select the OpenVPN protocol from the drop down list under where it says VPN Protocol.
3. Open a terminal of your choosing and run the following commands (you will need to enter your login password to install the components needed for openvpn, run one line at a time):
su -
apt-get install openvpn
4. Make a folder called PenguinVPN in your home folder and then cd into it (change directory) as shown below:
mkdir PenguinVPN
cd PenguinVPN
5. Download the PenguinVPN 2.0 configuration and extract the etc folder to newly created PenguinVPN folder.
curl -O https://www.thinkpenguin.com/files/PenguinVPN-2-OpenVPN-TPE-R1200-R1300-Router-Configuration.tar.gz
6. Extract the archive:
tar xf PenguinVPN-2-OpenVPN-TPE-R1200-R1300-Router-Configuration.tar.gz
7. Once a subscription has been purchased you'll receive an email containing a compressed file that contains the keys to connect to our PenguinVPN 2.0 servers. You'll need to download the file named PenguinVPN-2-OpenVPN-Keys.tar.gz and extract it to your ~/PenguinVPN/etc/openvpn folder.
tar -xzf ~/Downloads/PenguinVPN-2-OpenVPN-Keys.tar.gz -C ~/PenguinVPN/etc/openvpn
8. Then anytime you want to connect run the following command:
sudo openvpn ~/PenguinVPN/etc/openvpn/penguin-new-tcp.ovpn
9. If everything worked then you should see some city/state/country other than your own when you check out what your IP address is. To do that open a web browser and visit http://infosniper.net/ or another similar site to validate your VPN connection is working.