Google Chrome 28 on RHEL6/CentOS6
As you might know, Google Chrome is no longer supported on older enterprise Linux distributions such as RHEL6 and clones. The system requirements page only shows recent versions of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Debian and Fedora under the supported OS list.
Luckily I found this very useful guide to install it. The author provides a shell script that downloads some requirements for Google Chrome (basically compatible libraries from Fedora 15), wraps them into an rpm called chrome-deps, installs that rpm and after that the OS becomes supported, so the script installs the latest version of google-chrome-stable (28 as of this writing).
I ran the script with success on Centos 6.4, Oracle Linux 6.4 and RHEL 6.3. While the script ran successfully on RHEL 6.3, google-chrome didn’t start as it was complaining about an undefined symbol:
/usr/bin/google-chrome: symbol lookup error: /usr/bin/google-chrome: undefined symbol: _XGetRequest
The developers themselves admitted that is not a real error, but more like a way to prevent people from installing Google Chrome on older distributions! Since both OL 6.4 and CentOS 6.4 worked fine and they are both RHEL derivatives, I can assume RHEL 6.4 is supported as well. And since RHEL6U4 brings a more recent version of libX11 which is a Chrome dependency that causes the above error, I can also assume 6.4 is the minimum supported for RHEL-like distros.
Hope this helps.
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Just a note that later versions of my script (now at 4.10) will ask to upgrade libX11 to the latest 1.5 release. This fixes your missing symbol seen in CentOS 6.3 without having to do a full upgrade to 6.4 (though my script now offers to do a full upgrade at the end, but you can opt out of that if you really want to stay on 6.3).
I’m guessing there’s some other 6.3-only software you have on the system (presumably third party?) which keeps you on 6.3?
Hi Richard, thanks for stepping in. I’m mainly using CentOS and Oracle Linux 6.4 since they both provide free updates. The RHEL 6.3 was only a test case since I had it installed in a VM.
Cheers and keep up the good work!