scientific linux 6.x 不再支援 chrome，連上 google 網站直接下載 chrome 的 rpm 檔案裝，會顯示缺少相依性套件，就算安裝了這些缺的套件，還是會再顯示缺其它套件，陷入一個無窮迴圈! 於是有人寫了安裝 chrome 的 shell script，真是佛心來著!!

• How to install Google Chrome 28+ on RHEL/CentOS 6 or 7

How to install Google Chrome 28+ on RHEL/CentOS 6 or 7

The problem

Sadly, the Google folks apparently think that the world‘s most popular commercial Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 aka RHEL 6) and its free equivalents (e.g. CentOS 6 and Scientific Linux 6) are no longer worth supporting at all w.r.t. their Google Chrome browser.

Yes, they‘ve dropped support for version 6.X of the above RHEL/CentOS-based platforms from Google Chrome 28 onwards, despite the OSes being the latest release and fully supported by their respective maintainers until November 2020! It‘s equally bad that the latest Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers run happily on the platforms, providing short shrift for any excuses the Google folks have come up with to justify their somewhat blinkered support stance.

I‘ve built Chromium from regularly pulled source code in the past for CentOS 5 and it‘s a tough job on that platform and I didn‘t want to do it again for CentOS 6. Note that RHEL/CentOS 7 users are also catered for, so please keep reading if you‘re on that platform.

The solution

Luckily, there is a solution to this and it‘s not rocket science or that original either. You need to grab libraries from a more recent Linux distro, put them in a tree (/opt/google/chrome/lib) exclusively picked up by Google Chrome and then you can indeed run Google Chrome on RHEL/CentOS 6.5 or later.

I‘ve picked Fedora 15 and 17 RPMs to extract the libraries from because they‘re close to RHEL/CentOS 6‘s libraries and the newest ones to actually work with the latest Google Chrome release on RHEL/CentOS 6.

The download

install_chrome.sh 5.02 (10th July 2014 - removed pre-release CentOS 7 code and .repo file, refusal to upgrade to 6.5 or later now aborts rather than warns/continues)

It‘s a bash shell script, so you run it as root as follows:

chmod u+x install_chrome.sh./install_chrome.sh

The script has optional command line arguments - here‘s the output of "./install_chrome.sh -h":

Syntax: ./install_chrome.sh [-b] [-d] [-f [-f [-f]]] [-h] [-n] [-q] [-s]        [-t tmpdir] [-u] [-U]-b (or --beta) will switch to beta versions (google-chrome-beta).-d (or --delete) will delete the temporary directory used for downloads   if an installation was successful.-f (or --force) forces an automatic "y" for any interactive prompting   except for OS mismatch/OS upgrade/reboot prompts. Specify -f twice to force   it for OS mismatches or OS upgrades as well and three times for reboots   on top of that.-h (or -? or --help) will display this syntax message.-n (or --dryrun) will show what actions the script will take,   but it won‘t actually perform those actions.-q (or --quiet) will switch to "quiet mode" where minimal info is displayed.   Specify -q twice to go completely silent except for errors.-s (or --stable) will switch to stable versions (google-chrome-stable),   which is the default if -b or -U haven‘t previously been specified.-t tmpdir (or --tmpdir tmpdir) will use tmpdir as the temporary directory   parent tree rather than $TMPDIR (if set) or /tmp.-u performs an uninstallation of Google Chrome and chrome-deps rather the   default action of an installation.-U (or --unstable) will switch to unstable versions (google-chrome-unstable).

I would recommend you read the comments at the top of the script and inspect the code carefully since you need to run it as root. It will perform a fair number of downloads to obtain what it needs and if it finishes successfully, you should be able to run the "google-chrome" command (or select it from the Internet category in your GNOME main menu) as a non-root user.

The dropping of NPAPI support for plug-ins (especially Java)

In a stunningly stupid move, Linux Google Chrome 35 onwards no longer supports the NPAPI plug-in protocol used by almost all browser plug-ins, instead preferring the PPAPI protocol. The biggest impact this has is to disable Java applets inside the browser, so if you need to use Java applets regularly, I‘m afraid I‘d have to recommend switching browsers (e.g. to Mozilla Firefox) until there‘s a Linux Java implementation that supports PPAPI.

You can read more about this at the appropriate Google Chrome bugs (the main one and a merged one), plus there‘s a developer discussion about it. The claim is that less than 0.7% of Linux Google Chrome users run NPAPI plug-ins regularly, so Linux was deliberately targeted earliest (other platforms will drop support later in 2014). To be frank, this move is just as bad as dropping RHEL/CentOS 6 support (though RHEL/CentOS 7 mostly fixes that) - why do this when there‘s no Linux Java PPAPI support yet?

The crash on some systems

Some users (including me on my main desktop) have reported that Google Chrome 36 crashes on their system and others (including me in a VM) have been able to run that release fine. I tried it on fairly untouched (just yum updated and nothing else) 32-bit and 64-bit CentOS 6.5 GNOME desktop via VMs and live ISOs and sure enough, it does actually run, albeit with buggy recvmsg error messages on the console. This means something I‘ve installed in my 64-bit CentOS 6.5 environment has caused version 36 to crash, whereas version 35 runs fine on it. It‘s no big deal - I‘ll just add a "clean" 64-bit CentOS 6.5 VM to my testing and I‘ll be moving to CentOS 7 at some point soon anyway.

The changelog

• Version 5.02 (10th July 2014):
  CentOS 7 final is out, so I removed the pre-release repo code and the .repo file it created if it‘s present. Google Chrome will fail in any pre-6.5 OS release, so refuse to continue if the user won‘t upgrade to 6.5 or later. Changed equivalent RHEL and CentOS references to be RHEL/CentOS.

   

• Version 5.01 (26th June 2014):
  The latest pre-release CentOS 7 live ISO creates placeholder .repo files which messed up the repo-creating code I‘d put in 5.00. This has been corrected by checking that the .repo files have at least one non-blank/non-comment line in them (they don‘t at the moment!).

   

• Version 5.00 (21st June 2014):
  Added initial 64-bit RHEL/CentOS 7 (pre-release) support that‘s been tested in a VM. This involved possibly creating an updates repo file if no repos are found and not building the chrome-deps RPM on RHEL/CentOS 7 of course. Upped the minimum RHEL/CentOS 6 release supported by the script to version 6.5. Tidied up some of the final messages output by the script.

   

• Version 4.70 (17th May 2014):
  Finally fix the 2-hourly segfault that was appearing in syslog. It was a self-call to the google-chrome bash script which was fixed by unsetting LD_LIBRARY_PATH before the self-call. Steve Cleveland suggested a non-interactive mode to allow the script to be cron‘ed, so I added a -f flag (specify up to 3 times depending on what prompting you want eliminated) to provide this.

   

• Version 4.60 (12th April 2014):
  Latest Google Chrome prompted me for a keyring password, which I eventually realised was because of an undefined gnome_keyring_attribute_list_new symbol. Turns out this first appeared in an F17 library, so I‘ve had to download F17‘s libgnome-keyring RPM and extract libgnome-keyring.so.0 from it. I had no idea people managed to get a RHEL/CentOS 6 install with no nss package (must be some sort of minimal install I guess), so that‘s been added. Thanks to Ravi Saive at tecmint.com for suggesting this, though no-one actually told me the issue directly :-( Check the size and cksum of a downloaded Fedora RPM after the download as well as before (duh!).

   

• Version 4.50 (11th December 2013):
  If Google Chrome execs a helper app and that app then execs another sub-process, then LD_PRELOAD would mess up that second sub-process. This has been fixed by saving, unsetting and restoring LD_PRELOAD around the point where the helper app is exec‘ed (an example would be file-roller viewing .tar.gz downloads). Previously downloaded F15 RPMs are now checksummed and size-checked on subsequent script runs. If they don‘t match, they are deleted and re-downloaded. This is a special non-raw-orphan-kitten-eating release just for a certain CentOS mailing list member :-)

   

• Version 4.41 (9th December 2013):
  A user reported that glibc-devel wasn‘t present (causing the gcc compilation to fail), so I‘ve added this in as a dependency. Removed the SELinux warning at the end of the script because enforcing mode seems to not upset nacl_helper in recent Google Chrome releases. Fedora 15 RPMs have moved to the archive site, so adjusted the code to only download from the archive site. Primary testing is now with CentOS 6.5 and Scientific Linux 6.4.

   

• Version 4.40 (5th October 2013):
  The same user who reported the 4.30 issue found another missing symbol, this time in the Fedora 15 libgtk-x11-2.0 library. The symbol is defined in the Fedora 15 libgdk_pixbuf-2.0 library, so that is now extracted from the additionally downloaded Fedora 15 gdk-pixbuf2 RPM. The chrome-deps RPM is therefore now at version 1.03.

   

• Version 4.30 (4th October 2013):
  A user reported a missing symbol that was tracked down to the Fedora 15 libgio-2.0 library. That library and its libgobject-2.0 dependency are now additionally extracted and included in the chrome-deps RPM (which was bumped to version 1.02).

   

• Version 4.20 (22nd August 2013):
  If possible, use "yum check-update google-chrome-stable" ahead of the OmahaProxy CSV site to look for updates. Any newer version can be installed rather than insisting on the exact OmahaProxy version (after a full day being out-of-date after the Google Chrome 29 launch, we can‘t trust it not to happen on each new release). Used some extra params to the OmahaProxy request to narrow the data down more precisely. Google Chrome 29 doesn‘t wrongly output dbus messages like version 28 did, so the terminal warning was removed.

   

• Version 4.10 (8th August 2013):
  Fixed Google Talk (Hangouts) plugin crash by unsetting LD_LIBRARY_PATH when it‘s run (yes, for some reason, the plugin is built with an older toolchain than Google Chrome itself). Some users are reporting i686 is used in their RPM build path instead of i386 - I couldn‘t reproduce this, but I‘ve added code to work around this anyway. modify_wrapper no longer outputs anything to stdout if it successfully updates /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome.

   

• Version 4.01 (30th July 2013):
  Emergency 2-char bug fix because I found a 4th build environment that triggered an rpmbuild bug (parses % directives on a commented line in a spec file). Removed the two percent chars on a comment line and it works again. No idea why my normal three build environments didn‘t show this problem (one of them is literally a VM image of a clean desktop right after a CentOS 6 install).

   

• Version 4.00 (30th July 2013):
  New chrome-deps RPM is built that includes 7 Fedora libraries (libdl.so.2 added for this release), unset_vars.so (updated slightly) and a modify_wrapper script that is run post-install to add code to /etc/default/google-chrome to modify google-chrome if its LD_PRELOAD addition isn‘t present. modify_wrapper will also enable the Google Chrome repo. Download/installation of google-chrome-stable/chrome-deps dependencies is now prompted for. Don‘t remove /etc/cron.daily/google-chrome or /etc/yum.conf.d/google-chrome.repo any more. Added -t (temp dir parent location) option and also -s (stable), -b (beta) and -U (unstable) options to switch release channels.

   

• Version 3.20 (27th July 2013):
  Compile and install LD_PRELOAD functions that wrap around exec*() routines, bringing in gcc as a new dependency. The functions save/blank LD_LIBRARY_PATH, call the original routines and, if they return, restore LD_LIBRARY_PATH. This is an initial effort to stop helper apps/plugins from crashing when run from within Google Chrome.

   

• Version 3.11 (25th July 2013):
  If SELinux is enabled, set appropriate SELinux contexts on Fedora libraries in /opt/google/chrome/lib and that directory itself. If SELinux is enabled and in enforcing mode, display a warning that permissive mode (with a reboot) is required to get nacl_helper to run correctly.

   

• Version 3.10 (24th July 2013):
  Use .so.0 extension (instead of .so.3 in earlier releases) for renamed Fedora ld-linux library. Also changed references to ld-linux*.so.0 in ld-linux, libc and libstdc++ Fedora libraries. Thanks to Marcus Sundberg for this suggestion. Dependency list for Google Chrome RPM is now redhat-lsb, wget, xdg-utils GConf2, libXScrnSaver and libX11 (1.5+). Hangs/errors occurred with a CentOS 6.0 VM I ran Google Chrome under, but 6.4 is fine, so that‘s now the minimum OS version requirement (script offers to upgrade 6.0-6.3 to the latest release - if declined, the script aborts).

   

• Version 3.00 (21st July 2013):
  Added command line options at long last. -d will remove /tmp/chrome_install at the end of the script. -h shows syntax help. -n displays a dry run of what it would do without actually doing anything. -q reduces the output messages to the minimum needed and -q -q silences the output completely apart from fatal errors. -u uninstalls the Fedora libraries and the Google Chrome RPM. Abort script if it detects Google Chrome is running. Display disk/file usage (only if files are present) for /opt/google/chrome and /tmp/chrome_install at the start and end of the script. If it‘s defined, use $TMPDIR instead of /tmp. Install Fedora libraries before the Google Chrome RPM (was the other way around). Don‘t download Fedora RPMs and/or unpack them if the Fedora libraries are already installed in /opt/google/chrome/lib - this speeds up second and later runs (e.g. for Google Chrome upgrades) significantly.

   

• Version 2.10 (20th July 2013):
  Can detect if Fedora 15 RPMs have been moved to the archive site and will download from there instead if they have. Fixed incorrect check for lsb dependency. Remove a cron file and repo file installed by the Google Chrome RPM. Simplistic check that OS is an RHEL/CentOS 6 derivative. Early exits now run clean up routine. Downloads all go through one function that will restore any pre-existing file if the download fails.

   

• Version 2.00 (14th July 2013):
  32-bit support added thanks to prodding from Seva Epsteyn. Version check both installed and downloaded Google Chrome against the OmahaProxy CSV list and only download/install if out-of-date. Use updated Fedora 15 RPMs rather than the original ISO versions. Warn if an enabled Google Chrome repo is present. General code tidy ups and more/readable messages are output now too.

   

• Version 1.10 (13th July 2013):
  Added auto-update check because the number of versions today is getting somewhat crazy. Also fixed an incorrect skip of force-installing a downloaded Chrome RPM (if any previous Chrome RPM had been installed, it would have never installed a new one!).

   

• Version 1.02 (13th July 2013):
  Added --no-check-certificate to wget command (my testing didn‘t need it, but someone reported that their wget did need it). Also yum install wget if it‘s not on the system.

   

• Version 1.01 (13th July 2013):
  Fixed the bad variable that plagued version 1.00.

   

• Version 1.00 (13th July 2013):
  Downloads latest Chrome and some Fedora 15 RPMs, installs lsb and some extracted libraries from the F15 RPMs. Had a last-minute bad variable added that broke the Chrome download completely. :-(

The TODO list

• The first-time install and run of Google Chrome on a non-KDE system produces some xdg-mime errors. This is a bug in the xdg-utils package that I‘ve reported to Red Hat, so you‘ll have to wait for them to fix it.

   

• On my CentOS 6 physical desktop with the closed source AMD Catalyst graphics driver, I get an "InitializeSandbox() called with multiple threads in process gpu-process" message on the console, but I don‘t see this on VMs that don‘t use the Catalyst driver. It looks like the browser isn‘t sandboxed and doesn‘t have hardware GPU acceleration either :-( Note that if Google Chrome (or Mozilla Firefox) crashes your Catalyst-driven desktop, this is an issue with the Catalyst driver and you should update to a version that doesn‘t crash the X server.

The compatibility note

Please note that RHEL/CentOS 6 and 7 references on this page should hopefully equally cover all RHEL/CentOS 6 and 7 derivatives. Note that I only use CentOS 6 myself (and CentOS 7 final in a VM) so can‘t guarantee the compatibility with those other derivatives, but I do actually perform brief testing on a Scientific Linux 6 VM as well. Oh and someone‘s bound to ask - no, the script won‘t work with RHEL/CentOS 5 or earlier.

The feedback

Any bugs, fixes, improvements or suggestions should be fed back to me, Richard K. Lloyd, at rklloyd@gmail.com but please note there is no warranty on this product whatsoever and the script itself is in the public domain. Bemusingly, one ultimate feedback was a tutorial video someone uploaded to YouTube!

The defence (no, it doesn‘t eat raw orphaned kittens)

Apparently one of the guys on the CentOS mailing list really doesn‘t like my script, claiming that it "consumes raw orphaned kittens" and "should be classified as a criminal offense". Here‘s my response:

• Yes, Fedora 15/17 RPMs are indeed no longer updated, but none of the later Fedora releases have binary RPMs that work. There may be an alternative - download equivalent source RPMs from the latest Fedora and attempt to build the libraries from source. This is potentially a huge undertaking (tracking RPM updates, jumps of major Fedora versions and a much larger - and possibly fluctuating - dependency chain all give me nightmares!) and has no guarantee of success. Building that much source code could also massively lengthen the script running time and, no, I wouldn‘t host the built libraries here (bandwidth and trust issues...).

   

• It‘s not clear to me at all why the LD_PRELOAD code I‘ve written is "abuse". It‘s needed so that anything exec()‘ed by Google Chrome (e.g. helper apps) doesn‘t use the Fedora 15/17 libraries that are intended strictly just to start up Google Chrome (via LD_LIBRARY_PATH).

   

• To produce a single script that does everything (including root-only RPM installs) obviously requires root access. Yes, in theory, you could skip root-requiring actions if you‘re not root, but these are so intermingled in the code flow (e.g. you need to install some prerequisite RPMs and even upgrade your OS if it‘s pre-6.5 before you even get to build the chrome-deps RPM), that it would be extremely clumsy to try to split root vs. non-root actions.

   

• The script doesn‘t consume raw orphaned kittens - more like raw oprhaned Google build systems!

The ChromeDriver server (Web app developers only)

If you‘re a Web app developer and have just installed Google Chrome via my script, you may also be trying to run the ChromeDriver server on RHEL/CentOS 6 to automate the testing of your app. Sadly, after downloading and unpacking it (and making sure you got the latest 32-bit or 64-bit version), you‘ll find it has a familiar library problem very similar to Google Chrome‘s. However, this is easily fixed by simply using the F15/F17 libraries from your Google Chrome installation:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/google/chrome/lib./chromedriver[Should output: Starting ChromeDriver (v2.9.248304) on port 9515]

The non-solution at Red Hat‘s Customer Portal

I was bemused to find this on the Red Hat Customer Portal. Basically, it says "Google Chrome doesn‘t install in RHEL 6", gives a bunch of failed yum install outputs and, er, that‘s it. Even funnier is that the right hand side of the page says "This solution has been verified to work by Red Hat Customers and Support Engineers for the specified product version(s)." :-) Maybe they need to link to this page...

The Chromecast

If you have a Chromecast, you can install the Google Cast extension in Google Chrome by going to the Extensions section of the Chrome Web store and searching for "Google Cast". You can then cast a tab from your RHEL/CentOS Google Chrome, though it can be laggy. More info (from a UK/Linux/Android perspective) about Chromecast can be found on my sister site.