OpenSuSE update to Leap
My home computer runs OpenSuSE. Recently, it needed an upgrade that turned into a new installation. Oh well, but at least now I’m running OpenSuSE Leap.
A new SuSE install always takes me a bit of time to set up the way I want it. First, it’ll always, always come without a C or C++ compiler, or indeed most of the toolchain you’d need to compile and link, never mind debug. My go-to is to download the latest nethack sources and install tools until I can compile nethack.
A quick game of nethack, and back to setup. I have an ongoing project that uses OpenCV, so I needed to install some supporting libraries and tools for that; that might be a blog post of its own.
Then I wanted to install Google Chrome. You can
download it from Google. The ‘install
file’ that it gives you is just an rpm (
for SuSE/Fedora; you can also get a .deb file). Naively, I clicked on the
downloaded file in Chromium (yes, I wanted both Chromium and Chrome on my
machine, why not?) and it decided to start AppStream, which promptly popped up an alert window
asking me to make sure it has been properly installed. It did not say how to
do that or what precisely it was missing though.
Then when I asked it again to install Google Chrome, it showed me another popup just saying
‘Internal Error’. So not helpful. I hit the internet some more, found some SuSE
forum where the answer basically was “you’ll be fine just installing Chromium”. But
why can’t I install Google Chrome if I want to? Why does the tool not work?
Some more Internet searches showed that a lot of people just install chrome using zypper. For example, here. Since I already had the rpm, I decided to continue with that though.
The downloaded file is just an rpm:
file google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm: RPM v3.0 bin i386/x86_64
So let’s try to install it manually:
rpm -i google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
warning: google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm: Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 7fac5991: NOKEY
error: Failed dependencies:
libappindicator3.so.1()(64bit) is needed by google-chrome-stable-73.0.3683.75-1.x86_64
Ah, now this is information. I installed libappindicator3, tried again. Now the rpm command even asked for root permissions, showing me it was getting further than before.
rpm -i google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
warning: google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm: Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 7fac5991: NOKEY
error: can't create transaction lock on /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm/.rpm.lock (Permission denied)
The NOKEY warning is telling me I should download Google’s public signing key and verify that I got the right packages.
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub
sudo rpm --import linux_signing_key.pub
rpm --checksig -v google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm:
Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 7fac5991: OK
Header SHA1 digest: OK
MD5 digest: OK
V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 7fac5991: OK
And now it works:
sudo rpm -i google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
service: no such service atd
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable to provide /usr/bin/google-chrome (google-chrome) in auto mode
The line about the atd service is harmless based on what I could find; looks
like Chrome wants the service enabled for scheduling, but it’ll be fine
without it.
It’s strange how happy it made me feel that I just spent a good part of a day basically just getting my system usable again after an update.