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Installation instruction for Linux

I-Voting in Linux Operating System

The voter application is available for 64-bit Linux distributions. 

The i-voting application, or the voter application, works on the following tested Linux distributions:

  • Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) (64bit)
  • 22.04 (LTS) (64bit)
  • 22.10 (64bit)
  • 23.04 (64bit)

The application is also very likely to function on other distributions that have functioning ID-card support. 

 

Installing the voter application

The voter application is distributed as an executable file with a size up to 5 MB.

During i-voting, go to the elections web page opening page and press the button “Laadi alla” [“Download”] and save the voter application. 

During downloading, it is necessary to watch into which folder the Voter Application file is downloaded (e.g., Allalaadimised, Downloads, etc.), and what name it has. In order to run the voter application, the downloaded file has to be made executable. For that, open Terminal and navigate with “cd” command to the folder where the Voter Application file was saved. For example, if the folder was ‘Downloads’, type "cd Downloads” on the command line. To grant permission to run, type "chmod a+x <downloaded_file_name>” on the command line. Next, run the application from the same place with the command "./<downloaded_file_name>”. Then the voter application will open and it is possible to i-vote.

For voting with an ID-card, the voter application needs a functioning ID-card software. In such a case, the voter application finds the necessary libraries automatically. In the case of ID-cards issued until December 2018, voting is effected via OpenSC PKCS11 library opensc-pkcs11.so. For ID-cards issued as of December 2018, the card manufacturer’s PKCS11 library libOcsCryptoki.so is used.

In the case when the necessary libraries are not in their standard locations, the environment variable EVOTE_PKCS11_LIB can be used to refer to the location of the necessary library. Depending on the shell used, there are various options. For example:

export EVOTE_PKCS11_LIB=/usr/local/lib/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so

or

setenv EVOTE_PKCS11_LIB /usr/local/lib/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so.

In addition to the voter application, other applications, such as Mozilla, may also use the PKCS11 library to communicate with the ID-card. If the ID card is already in use by an application, other applications may be denied access to the ID-card, depending on the OpenSC library settings. In order to check access denial, open the file opensc.conf (as a general rule, it is located in the catalogue /etc/opensc or /usr/local/etc/opensc) and check the value of the parameter lock_login. If the value of the parameter lock_login is “true”, make sure that all other applications using ID-card are closed before you use the voter application.

 

Using a proxy

If the Internet connection is via a proxy server, the environment variable https_proxy must be set to use the voter application:

export https_proxy=http://proxy.server:8082/

Once the environment variable is set, the voter application displays a window where the proxy parameters can be changed if necessary.

 

If an error occurs

More information on troubleshooting for ID-card is available on the elections website. If you need help about the activities connected with the ID-card, please phone +372 631 6633 or e-mail to [email protected].

If your computer or a technical fault does not allow i-voting, you can vote at a polling place.