I’m attempting to start the Brave browser from the command line (I’m using Ubuntu 24.04) and passing the ‘–user-data-dir’ option to point to a folder that is mounted from a VeraCrypt encrypted file container but I get an about a failure to create the SingletonLock, Operation not permitted. Here is the error:
dbg@XPS-13-7390:~$ brave-browser --user-data-dir=/media/veracrypt1
[32350:32350:0405/124401.157265:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(340)] Failed to create /media/veracrypt1/SingletonLock: Operation not permitted (1)
[32350:32350:0405/124401.157407:ERROR:chrome_main_delegate.cc(530)] Failed to create a ProcessSingleton for your profile directory. This means that running multiple instances would start multiple browser processes rather than opening a new window in the existing process. Aborting now to avoid profile corruption.
At first I thought it was a permissions issue so I mounted the folder from VeraCrypt with the mount option “umask=002”. I even tried umask=000, meaning read/write/execute for all, but no difference in the error.
Here are the permissions of the mounted folder:
dbg@XPS-13-7390:/media$ ls -lah
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Apr 5 13:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4.0K Feb 21 18:39 ..
drwxrwxr-x 32 dbg dbg 4.0K Apr 5 13:04 tmp
drwxrwxr-x 5 dbg dbg 8.0K Dec 31 1969 veracrypt1
As another test, I used the normal, non-VeraCrypt directory, tmp which worked correctly:
dbg@XPS-13-7390:~$ brave-browser --user-data-dir=/media/tmp
tracing_subscriber - init success
In that case, the browser opens and works as expected, and I can see new content in the /media/tmp directory.
I tried a few other variants like creating a symbolic link to the normal .config directory pointing to a VeraCrypt folder but I always get the above error.
I also found the following post on the Linux Mint forums that seems similar but couldn’t get that to work either:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=418333
Does anyone know if it should work to use a VeraCrypt folder for a data (or profile) directory?
Thanks,
D