Chrome rather than Chromium
Google Chrome is not FOSS. But it does stuff Chromium does not do. You can replace Chromium with Chrome, or have them both on the system. You do not have to choose one or the other because you can have them both.
Apparently in Mint 18.3 Chrome cannot be installed via the Mint Software manager. Instead we shall go to console and install it.
- Create a text file in the path /etc/apt/sources.list.d
cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d vi chrome.list
- Add the following text to the newly created chrome.list file
deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
- Download the current signed key [ THIS METHOD IS OUTDATED AND DOES NOT WORK ON MINT 22.0 ]
wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add - apt-get update
- Install Google Chrome from the new repository
apt install google-chrome-stable
This procedure was verified in 2017 on Mint 18.3 Sylvia installed Google Chrome Version 63.0.3239.108 (Official Build) (64-bit)
***note:Although Ubuntu requires the repository be added manually as shown above, it is probably not necessary with Mint as this distribution allows non-FOSS. Try installing w/o adding the repo first.
***note:sudo can be used with the deb command, but cannot be used with wget to add the key (for some reason) so you may have to sudo bash then use wget to update key.
dearmor
Linux Mint 22.00 and apt-key is fully deprecated as it no longer works at all. To work though the GPG horror show it is important to understand the two paths you need to add or modify files in, they are:
- /usr/share/keyrings/
- /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
You will need to sudo everything to do this. The first path is where the actual GPG key goes for Google Chrome (the software we are installing in this case). The second path is where you add the new software source.
Step #1 - Get that lousy asinine key you need since the devs think everyone is out to get you. execute:
sudo wget -qO- https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/google-chrome.gpg > /dev/null
Critical: The "--dearmor" command line switch seems to make this work. Without that, the key is not readable by APT on Mint 22. Very the key file was created in /usr/share/keyrings/
ls -laF /usr/share/keyrings/
You will want to see the file "google-chrome.gpg" with 644 file permissions and a size of at least 12K or better (so we know it is not null).
Step #2 - Add the "Additional Repository" to software sources. You can use the Software Sources GUI or you can create an independent file for chrome, lets do the file method for this example
sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list
add the following line of text which has the repository as well as the file path to the asinine key that we now have to cope with.
deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/google-chrome.gpg] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
Now you should run
sudo apt update
