Estonian open-eID installation on Debian bullseye

If you are an Estonian ID-card holder or e-resident, wanting to install open-eID on Debian’s latest release bullseye or one of its derivates, this is how you do it!

Generally, Estonian RIA-authority is doing a good job supporting ID authentification to the Linux community, yet only Ubuntu is officially supported, which is a pity since popular Debian derivatives such as MX Linux are gaining traction. The latter is what this procedure was tested on, but it should work all the same for Debian’s mainline distro with the current codename bullseye.

Open a terminal and create a temporary directory.

mkdir temp
cd temp

Install libxalan package. A more recent version is available in the repositories for bullseye. But this version is required.

wget http://ftp.ee.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xalan/libxalan-c111_1.11-9_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i libxalan-c111_1.11-9_amd64.deb

Next import RIA public key. There will be a warning since apt-key command is going to be deprecated, but it will work either way.

wget -O /tmp/ria-public-2016.key https://installer.id.ee/media/install-scripts/C6C83D68.pub

sudo apt-key add /tmp/ria-public-2016.key

Add open-eid repositories to your package sources.

sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/open-eid.list <<< '# open-eid Estonian ID-Card'

sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/open-eid.list <<< 'deb https://installer.id.ee/media/ubuntu/ focal main'

Install open-eid package.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install open-eid

Installation should get rid of token-signing packages from earlier installations. Double check its deinstalled, since it may break functionality!

sudo apt remove token-signing-native token-signing-chrome token-signing-firefox

Also check your Browsers if any token signing extensions are installed and remove them! The installation script may fail to do this automatically, if the extension was added manually through the official add-on stores.
Finally install browser extension packages.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install open-eid
sudo apt install web-eid-chrome web-eid-firefox

Again, check your browser extensions manually if web-eid is installed. If not, add it through the browsers add-on store. The store page for Chrome-based browsers is here.

Successfully tested on:

• MX-Linux 21 wildflower“ (Brave browser & Firefox)

Leave a comment what system you tested it with and I may add to the list.

04.11.2022 Update

The official install script has been updated since release of this article. It will now work with Debian bullseye based distributions, although not officially supported.