This document is a mirror of http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk as of 2013-08-25.

How to install Google Chrome 28+ on CentOS 6

The problem

Sadly, the Google folks apparently think that the world's most popular commercial Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux aka RHEL) and its free equivalents (e.g. CentOS and Scientific Linux) 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-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.

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 CentOS 6.4 or later.

I've picked Fedora 15 RPMs to extract the libraries from because they're the closest to CentOS 6's libraries and the oldest ones to actually work with the latest Google Chrome release. Before you ask, I've tried the Fedora 16 libraries and the Google Chrome binary crashes using those. Without further ado, I present to you...

The download

install_chrome.sh 4.20 (22nd August 2013 - use yum check-update ahead of OmahaProxy if possible, don't rely on exact OmahaProxy versions [any newer version will do] when installing, removed terminal warning because of Google Chrome 29 fix)

It's a bash sell script, so you run it as root as follows: 

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

IMPORTANT NOTE:
In order for nacl_helper to start correctly, the current release requires you to disable SELinux e.g. temporarily with "echo 0 >/selinux/enforce" as root or permanently by editing /etc/selinux/config to set SELINUX=permissive and then rebooting. A future release will hopefully set some SELinux policies to avoid this requirement.

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

Syntax: ./install_chrome.sh [-b] [-d] [-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.
-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 do a fair amount of downloads to get what it needs and if it finishes successfully, you should be able to run the "google-chrome" command as a non-root user.

The changelog

The TODO list

The compatibility note

Please note that CentOS 6 references on this page should hopefully equally cover all RHEL 6 derivatives. Note that I only use CentOS 6 myself so can't guarantee the compatibility with those other derivatives. Oh and someone's bound to ask - no, the script won't work with 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. Because it has to be run as root and downloads/installs a load of packages, this is a riskier script than most!

The footnote: Google Music Manager rant

I just decided to see if I could upload some of my music collection to Google Play Music. And, no, I'm not paying £7.99 a month when I have a very large CD collection, a fair amount of which I've ripped to MP3s already.

Firstly, you can't upload MP3s from any phone or tablet, even one running Google's own Android OS or indeed a Chromebook running Chrome OS! Considering a large number of Google Play Music users will be playing back their music via an Android or Chrome OS device, it beggars belief that there isn't a way to upload that very same music from the device they'll listen to it on. Yes, I know Apple do the same obnoxious thing with their dreadful iTunes software (the Windows version of that is one of the most appalling pieces of software I've seen in years), but it still isn't an excuse for Google to follow the same dismal path Apple has trodden all these years.

Eventually, I discovered that there's a Google Music Manager you can download for Linux and there's even debs/RPMs in the same manner as Google Chrome has. Getting excited, I duly downloaded the Fedora 64-bit RPM, but it has an even newer toolchain used to compile it than Google Chrome does! And, no, you can't use a Fedora 19 VM to run the Google Music Manager either because Google won't let you, which is frankly ridiculous.

The solution I eventually found was on this German blog - Google still has some older RPMs you can download and run on CentOS 6. The 64-bit and 32-bit RPMs for version 1.0.55.7425 seem to work OK on CentOS 6.4. They have lsb and qtwebkit dependencies and there's some log4cxx message output on the console that you can ignore. The later 1.0.60.7918 and 1.0.71.8015 RPMs both crash on CentOS 6.4. I would strongly recommend you keep a copy of the working 1.0.55.7425 RPM, because Google may delete it at any time.