I'm trying to set up the VPN for my university on my laptop. I have downloaded to certificate file and put it in ~/misc/cacert.crt. When I try to set up the VPN, I click on the CA Certificate option and navigate to ~/misc/ in the selection menu. The certificate does not appear there. The folder appears empty. I tried adding a new version of the file that is named differently, also doesn't appear in the menu. I can double click on the file in nautilus and it brings up a little box with the details of the certificate, so there's nothing wrong with the file.

Any idea what's causing this bizarre problem?

I've found something out. If I do file cacert.crt I get data whereas if I do file on a .crt certificate that does show up (which I found in /etc/ssl/certs/) then I get PEM certificate. So presumably having .crt is not enough and the VPN setup wants file to return a valid certificate type? How do I change this?

grep 'crt' /etc/mime.types gives me application/x-x509-ca-cert which, as I understand it, should mean that *.crt files are recognised as certificates. So why is my cacert.crt only appearing as data?