Running Chromium as Root on BT5R2

Well, sort of.

You can't do it.  They (the omnipotent and wise developers of chromium) won't let you.  If you try to run it as root, you'll get this...

You can run it su'd as a regular user while logged in as root, but it takes a little X-Fu to get it done right.  First, create your user with the "adduser" command.  Then, give him access to the X display with the "xhost" command.

Here, our user is called "bob":

xhost +SI:localuser:bob

Now start a terminal session and "su bob".  Then run...

chromium-browser --user-data-dir=/home/bob

...and you're in.

This is not unique to Chromium,  The Tor Browser Bundle for Linux will also not let you run as root, which is a bitch and a half.  This trick will work with Tor as well, but it will bitch about the user's profile.  So far I haven't found (or looked for) an equivalent "user-data-dir" switch.

Chromium isn't in BT5R2 by default, so you need to install it with...

apt-get install chromium-browser

Neither is the Tor Browser Bundle, but I'm sure you can figure out how to install that.  It's as simple as downloading & extracting it.

So anyway, BT5R2 is the best version yet, but as usual I have my complaints.  I won't bore you with them now.

Give me another week.

Is Chrome crashing on you?

Specifically, version "11.0.696.60 unknown" (32-bit Windows)?

My system hung twice at ipv6.cnn.com, so thinking that must've been an IPv6 issue and knowing that CNN has been flaky on IPv6 in the past, I went back to the IPv4 version of CNN and it hung again.  Hung tight.  No keyboard.  No mouse.  No network.  CPU went to 100% and a crash dump started.

Tight.

That made three strikes for CNN, so I stayed away.  Then it happened on another site.  Both sites were "Flashy", if you catch my drift, and since Chrome has its own Flash drivers, that seemed a likely reason to suspect Chrome itself.

But then again, I recently updated the drivers for my NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT vidcard, which is always a crapshoot anyway (BTW, never use the NVIDIA drivers from Windows Update).  And of course, like everything else around here, the box is getting old.

I could roll the drivers back and do some investigating but the Lazy Man's way of dealing with this sort of thing is to complain online.

So here we are.

I would appreciate any input.

So Long, Ubuntu!

I have to admit I'm a little behind the curve on Ubuntu. 10.4 LTS has been around for months now, but all I've done is throw it on a VM and play with it a bit. That, and a disastrous upgrade attempt on a VirtualBox VM. But the other day I installed Xubuntu 10.4 (the Xcfe version) and I really liked what I saw, especially after installing Chrome on it.

In fact it was just about set up to my liking and I was moving some UT servers over to the disk when I decided to wrap up the install over Xwin from my XP box.

What a fucking disaster that turned out to be. It's all explained here.

Long story short, Ubuntu has decided to start screwing its pooch. So I said "buh-bye" to Ubuntu for good and started to look for another distro to install.

Oh, I thought about Fedora and CentOS and Suse and my first love, Slackware and I even [i]tried [/i]to download Suse & Slackie but it was a no go.

And although I'd [i]had it [/i]with Debian 5.0, that's where I landed. Deb will always take you back like a fat fuckbuddy.

At least it runs Chrome. That's about all I ask for in a Linux distro these days.

So here we are again. Look for EXPIV to become EXPV, but the BITCH House and Classic ]i[ will remain the same.

Chrome on CentOS AT LAST!

I'm not a big fan of CentOS but I've been compelled to run it for a couple of reasons. The first being I need something compatible (and free) that's compatible with the Red Hat systems we have at the Salt Mines. CentOS is Red Hat with all the branding removed to make it free.

The other reason is this old (circa 2005) Sony Vaio laptop I inherited from my kid, Inky Dink, shown at left. Installing Linux on it was pure Hell. CentOS is the only Linux distribution that runs on it and doesn't crash, and it's actually a pleasure to run it (the touchpad is super flaky but I usually use a USB mouse with it anyway).

And that in itself is the reason I have a love/hate relationship with CentOS. The stability comes at a price: everything about it is old.

Because it's old you just can't get the latest and greatest version of anything. Then again, because it's Red Hat compatible almost everything is available for it.

Almost! Chrome isn't. Google doesn't distribute a compatible version. But these folks in the UK hacked together a distribution that really works.

I'm using it now to write this. I have been using Opera, but it dogs down in places where I need it to perform, specifically Google Maps (I'm quite proud of this and I need to update it every day).

In typical Chrome fashion, everything is just plain fast.

I'll definitely be using this laptop a lot more in the future.

Now if I could only play UT on it... hmmm...