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kamzata

Member

From: ITALY

Registered: 2017-01-19

Posts: 37

nm-connection-editor -> "Automatically connect to VPN" grayed out

I'd like to automatically connect to a Wireguard VPN when connecting to specific networks. I'm using Gnome as Desktop environment and therefore network-manager which unfortunately doesn't allow this option. So, I installed nm-connection-editor in order to try to achieve that but, as you can see from the screenshot below, I cannot select any VPN connection.

If I flag the option and I try to save I receive this error in console:

(nm-connection-editor:38280): dconf-WARNING **: 16:56:52.116: failed to commit changes to dconf: Error spawning command line “dbus-launch --autolaunch=b65abbf86944469b9d7cdfe28499454b --binary-syntax --close-stderr”: Child process exited with code 1

(nm-connection-editor:38280): dconf-WARNING **: 16:56:52.116: failed to commit changes to dconf: Error spawning command line “dbus-launch --autolaunch=b65abbf86944469b9d7cdfe28499454b --binary-syntax --close-stderr”: Child process exited with code 1

I lunched it with sudo (sudo nm-connection-editor).

-thc

Member

Registered: 2017-03-15

Posts: 1,066

Re: nm-connection-editor -> "Automatically connect to VPN" grayed out

I lunched it with sudo (sudo nm-connection-editor).

No need to do that.

Just launch it as a user.

kamzata

Member

From: ITALY

Registered: 2017-01-19

Posts: 37

Re: nm-connection-editor -> "Automatically connect to VPN" grayed out

I lunched it with sudo (sudo nm-connection-editor).

No need to do that.

Just launch it as a user.

Of course, before I tried as regular user with same result.

-thc

Member

Registered: 2017-03-15

Posts: 1,066

Re: nm-connection-editor -> "Automatically connect to VPN" grayed out

Just checked my notebook  - you are right. Native "NM WireGuard" connections are no "VPN connections" in this specific option. I have a few additional OpenVPN connections that would work and all WIreGuard connections are simply absent from the drop-down menu of this option.

kamzata

Member

From: ITALY

Registered: 2017-01-19

Posts: 37

Re: nm-connection-editor -> "Automatically connect to VPN" grayed out

Just checked my notebook  - you are right. Native "NM WireGuard" connections are no "VPN connections" in this specific option. I have a few additional OpenVPN connections that would work and all WIreGuard connections are simply absent from the drop-down menu of this option.

It seems to be an old bug. Here's other info.

I also tried to set it up using the cli but without success:

$ nmcli connection modify MyWifi connection.autoconnect-slaves 1

$ nmcli connection modify MyWifi connection.secondaries "MyVPN"
Error: failed to modify connection.secondaries: 'MyVPN' is not a VPN connection profile.

Last edited by kamzata (2025-12-14 16:28:26)