How to install Google Chrome 28+ on RHEL/CentOS 6 or 7
The problem
Google developers seem to think that 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 from version 28 onwards. This is mainly because Google are using very recent Linux build systems which produce backwards-incompatible binaries, which is not a wise move when you're shipping closed source binaries.It seems Google missed the fact that RHEL/CentOS 6 are both fully supported by their respective maintainers until November 2020 (they're the only Linux distros offering a decade of support). 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
By using libraries from a more recent Linux distro and putting them in a tree exclusively picked up by Google Chrome, you can indeed run the latest 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
Please update your bash and wget packages nowThere were vulnerabilities in bash and wget that were recently fixed in RHEL/CentOS 6 and 7. Please update your system (e.g. "yum update bash wget") as soon as possible.
install_chrome.sh 6.10 (29th August 2014 - redirected stderr/stdout to /dev/null in google-chrome script, added Obsoletes: line to RPM spec file)
It's a bash shell script, so you download and run it as root as follows:
wget http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/install_chrome.sh chmod u+x install_chrome.sh ./install_chrome.shThe 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.
