I’m currently working in a project were the client imposes the use of VPN (using Juniper) to access its intranet.

Almost all the necessary setup is automated (some problems still occurs, but we get rid of them easily), but all the steps are described assuming an Ubuntu distro… So, to get things working on Linux Mint, it was necessary some manual work and witchcraft…

However, a special problem was driving me crazy.

Every time, after connecting to VPN, the Network Connect started correctly, stayed up for 2 seconds and, then… crash unexpectedly!

I’ve checked many factors that could lead to such strange behaviour, from browser compatibility to Java version running on browser, without success.

The Solution

Digging into the deepness of web, I’ve found the problem.

Network Connect relies on Xterm to dispatch a new connection. However, on Linux Mint, Xterm isn’t installed by default.

First I thought:

It can’t be that easy…

But, after running…

$ apt-get install xterm

… the problem was gone :)