Google Chrome And CentOS 6?

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Hi all,

Just recently I started getting the dreaded message about my CentOS 6.7
x64-installation wasn’t going to be supported anymore by Google Chrome.

“This computer will soon stop receiving Google Chrome updates because this Linux system will no longer be supported.”

Doing some google searches I found this;
http://superuser.com/questions/1011832/this-computer-will-soon-stop-receiving-google-chrome-updates-because-this-linux

Which in itself wasn’t too uplifting… Following the suggestion about installing Chromium instead worked, but it seems to be stuck at an ancient version of the browser.

Recompiling the available Chromium source is of course an option, but not for me. Not unless there are step-by-step guides doing it.

There was a rather long and somewhat heated discussion regarding Chrome on CentOS a while ago. Was there any real conclusion about Google Chrome on CentOS and how to get around this problem?
Are the views on this matter still infected?

I’m not looking forward to go back to the sluggish Firefox. 8-/

20 thoughts on - Google Chrome And CentOS 6?

  • You’re just seeing this now on a 6.7 system? I don’t believe that google-chrome (as provided from the google repositories) has worked
    (been installable) on CentOS-6.x machines for 2 years or more. [I
    just tried to install their current stable-48 on a 6.7 machine and got the libstdc++.so.6 dependency issue that broke this some time ago.]

    With CentOS-7 you’ll see that warning banner if/when you update to
    48. That release has been in beta since mid-december:
    <https://lists.CentOS.org/pipermail/CentOS/2015-December/156726.html>

    and was just pushed out from their “stable” channel late last week.

    My message in mid-december didn’t elicit any real solution, but maybe that it’s now hitting the stable release for CentOS-7 there might be more interest.

  • Am 25.01.2016 um 16:19 schrieb Richard :

    upstream provide a EL6 supplementary repository with chromium-browser. the emphasis lies on upstreams distribution. sources not available.

  • Correct, on a CentOS 6.7 x64-system, it just started popping up about a week ago.

    The Richard Lloyd-solution (are you The Richard Lloyd providing the install-script for Chrome?) has been working fine so far for me, flawlessly even. I’m just not quite sure what will happen in march, with the provided solution from http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/.

    I’d really like an official solution trickling down from RHEL. The script works fine, but it’s, well rather ghetto. 8-)

  • Bump.

    Please answer the original question (again) CentOS folks.

    Where are we with getting the RHEL version of Chromium available for CentOS?

    There should be no technical reason why we can’t get a working, up to date, and therefore secure version of chromium running on CentOS 6.7!!

  • Happy to host it, is this something you are working on at the moment Matthew ?

    Regards,

    –

  • Unfortunately, I have neither the time, nor expertise to partake in such a project.

    Since Mr. Hughes had already gotten earlier versions of chromium to build under CentOS 6 (c.f. http://people.CentOS.org/hughesjr/chromium/6/), and he indicated it was merely a matter of getting RHEL to give permission for him to redistribute it more “formally” to the community, I was hoping progress had been made with that.

    Have you, as the CentOS project lead ever asked RedHat if they can make their version of Chromium for CentOS 6 available for us? If not, can you please?

    Since this seems to come up periodically, there is a demand for it out there.

  • I wouldn’t worry too much about this until it actually happens. It pretty much means that Google is not willing to support running Chrome on CentOS, but then they never did to begin with anyways, it just so happens that the statically-built RPM for Fedora runs on CentOS 7
    without issue. It’s a scary and pretty much meaningless message.

    Eventually Chrome will likely require some newer version of a library than is available on CentOS 7, this happened in 6 a few years ago, and when that happens hopefully someone can work on a solution to fix it
    (possibly back-porting the newer version of said library).

    Right, Johnny Hughes (I think) used to build it, but IIRC he had to stop for reasons that you can find by searching this mailing list.

    Note that I’m personally not interested in getting chrome to work for CentOS 6, but I have a vested interest in keeping it working in 7, so when the time comes I’ll very likely find a solution myself and share it.

    Peter

  • I think Richard Lloyd had (has?) versions that work, but are usually a bit old.
    At present, CentOS-7 works with the rpm for Fedora on Google’s site. I
    don’t think RedHat had their own official rpm for either RHEL-6 or 7, did
    (do) they?

    I eventually updated to CentOS-7 on my main home machine, so I haven’t kept up.

  • is there someone else on here who can help ? I think if we can demonstrate some traction, it would go a long way in both the upstream engagement and the conversation with Red Hat – since we can then demonstrate a communal win.

    Johnny, can you perhaps quantify the effort a bit ? And if you need help what sort of help you might need for this ? I suspect a large part of that is just going to be time in day.

    I havent, but am more than willing to take the question up.

    regards,

    –

  • This is just a script that pulls some libraries from a Fedora repo. Unfortunately that approach won’t hold muster with security auditors .

    At present, CentOS-7 works with the rpm for Fedora on Google’s site. I
    They do, in their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Supplementary repository.

    c.f.

    We have over 150 workstations still on CO 6.7 while we are stuck dealing with all the changes to our environment necessary to code and test because of systemd in CO 7.

  • that looks like Supplementary content – we’ve never had that before.

    what we might need to do here is work the upstream beyond Red Hat where this works done, that makes it Supplementary content and not completely open source. Do we atleast know at this point what that might be ?

    regards

    –

  • I suspect it has to do with their “pepperflash” flash plugin.

    Clearly flash is on the way out, so any support for it is not necessary.

  • –uxpA2JbjVUSgQtlKceSxQunA5oS3OU79e Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

    It is indeed not completely open source. I was told that the agreement between Red Hat and Google only allows the RPMs for RHEL to be released to subscribers on the supplemental channel.

    Sorry, but I can’t release it.

    –uxpA2JbjVUSgQtlKceSxQunA5oS3OU79e

  • That was my understanding, that we have a “political” (really legal) issue, not a technical issue. I hope Karanbir can re-visit this with RedHat.

    Does anyone have a cookbook for building chromium under CentOS 6?

    Johnny, do you think you could release the steps you took to build what you did?

  • Am 19.04.2016 um 14:03 schrieb “Phelps, Matthew” :

    as a starting point:

    http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/obsolete/rhel6/SRPMS/
    http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/chromium-dev/rhel6/SRPMS/

    (chromium-50: http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/chromium/fedora24/x86_64/)

    Somewhere there is a “readme” file or maybe in the spec file (can’t remember)
    with explanations about the build environment (SCL dev and lib packages etc.) …