Arch Linux: Installing packages from AUR (Installing google chrome)

I have the choice of installing packages from Arch Linux User Community Repository.

Here is the summary of what I have done:

1. Pick a package from AUR, then download the tar package.

2. The tar contains PKGBUILD, untar it and a build directory is created.

3. Go to the build directory, and run makepkg -s. -s is an option to resolve package dependencies.

4. After makepkg is completed a pkg.tar.xz is created which I need to use pacman -U to install the package. -U is the option of installing a package with the path specified by me.

An example here is I will install google chrome:

I am in my ~/ directory:

wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/go/google-chrome-dev/google-chrome-dev.tar.gz

I have all the dependencies except for libpng12, I download the libpng12 tar file and untar it. In my build directory I execute makepkg -s.

Here’s the files created:

Use pacman -U to install the pkg.tar.xz file:

Note: Download libpng12 is not necessary to install google-chrome, because makepkg -s will auto resolve the dependencies, this one is just to illustrate how this is done.

Download the google chrome tar and makepkg -s

Install google-chrome pkg

Problem executing google chrome

Here’s the error:

[cyrus@archie google-chrome]$ google-chrome
[1:1:1745298926:ERROR:nacl_fork_delegate_linux.cc(78)] Bad NaCl helper startup ack (0 bytes)
[5010:5010:1745349695:FATAL:chrome_browser_main.cc(1195)] Check failed: PathService::Get(chrome::DIR_USER_DATA, &user_data_dir). Must be able to get user data directory!
Aborted

Oh by the way google and vlc cannot be run by root, so sudo cannot open chrome as well 😉

[cyrus@archie google-chrome]$ sudo google-chrome
[5004:5004:1730913346:ERROR:chrome_browser_main_gtk.cc(52)] Startup refusing to run as root.

Solve the problem of executing google chrome 

The reason why google chrome cannot be execute is because ~/.config/google-chrome was not created, because ~/.config does not belong to cyrus but to root. Creating a sub directory google-chrome under ./config also needs to be root, I can do chown cyrus:cyrus -R for the whole /.config though. I decided to do it only for ~/.config/google-chrome.

chown cyrus:cyrus -R ~/.config/google-chrome

Here it goes, google is up 🙂