Tuesday, November 20, 2012

chromium from packman

Saw this posted at the openSUSE forums:

Dear openSUSE users,
Since this morning, the Chromium browser will no longer be maintained on the openSUSE OBS, nor will it be provided together with the openSUSE distribution. Instead the Chromium browser will be build on Packman and be available for the already supported openSUSE versions. This new version will replace the chromium-ffmpeg package that was already delivered through Packman. In the next days, I will delete the Chromium package from it's home location network:chromium and also send a delete request to openSUSE:Factory. The reason for this change is that ffmpeg support is becoming more and more integrated with the browser itself, making it very hard to remove the ffmpeg related sourcefiles and still keeping a workable browser. In the last few weeks, I tried everything to keep Chromium part of the openSUSE distribution but unfortunately I failed. And as we all know ffmpeg is one of those packages that are not allowed to be present on the openSUSE OBS. Therefore the only logical decision was to move Chromium completely to Packman. The new package will be a full enabled Chromium with build-in support for ffmpeg. The new version 25.0.1329 is already available from Packman and should be installed automatically as that it replaces the chromium-ffmpeg package. If not, please check manually in order to get the latest version from Packman. This should be a one-time manual intervention. RegardsRaymond Community Maintainer for the openSUSE Chromium package




Now, I'm still an openSUSE rookie. I didn't quite know how to proceed with this, but managed to stumble through it all. It took me a few tries, with a few mistakes along the way. I stopped a couple of times, went away from the computer for awhile, let it rest, then came back and started over. In the end, here's how I switched to the new Chromium version 25.0.1329 from the Packman repository (it all looks so simple now!) (no doubt an openSUSE "pro" would have done all this with zypper from the command line):

To add the Packman repository, I started up YaST. Clicked on "Software Repositories" > clicked on the “Add” button > selected “Community Repositories” and clicked on “Next.” This gave me a list of repositories. I selected “Packman Repository.” Clicked “OK.” Then, the “Import Untrusted GnuPG Key” window came up. I clicked “Trust.” This added the Packman repository.

Next, to get the new Chromium version from Packman. Back in the YaST Control Center, I clicked on "Online Update." The default for "Show Patch Category" was "Needed Patches." I changed this to "Unneeded Patches" using the drop-down list, and saw an update for Chromium in the summary listing. I clicked on it, and a list of packages showed up in the package list: chromium, chromium-desktop-kde, and chromium-suid-helper. At the lower right, I clicked on the "Versions" tab and selected the newer version from the Packman repo. I did that for each of the three packages in the list. Then I clicked on the "Accept" button.

This took me from Chromium 24.0.1290.0-1.19.1-i586 from openSUSE-12.2-Update to Chromium 25.0.1329.0-2.1-i586 from Packman Repository.

No comments: