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Chrome.

Chrome.

I take a subscription to Eurosport for a month each January in order to watch the Australian Open Tennis and have found it frustrating that the absence of Microsoft Silverlight prevents me from viewing the live broadcasts on my Slackware box. Slackware is my main and much preferred OS in the office. It is possible that I could run Pipelight as an alternative to Silverlight but that would require the use Wine with the 32 bit libraries the setting up of which I have always find to be a pain.

I also have a CentOS 7 laptop and I noticed that the Chrome browser thereon happily runs Eurosport so the quickest route to a tv tennis fest appeared to be installing Chrome on Slackware.

A search on the web revealed that Patrick Volkerding has a slackBuild available for Chrome in the extra directory of Slackware 14.1 see http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:software:google-chrome

Unfortunately after downloading the latest 64 bit .deb file and the slackBuild I found that running the build generated the following error:

no entry data.tar.lzma in archive
lzma: (stdin): File format not recognized
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

A bit of digging in the slackBuild revealed that the script expects to find the data.tar file in lzma format. Using "ar" with the "t" option we find that a similar file is included in the current archive but in the xz format.

ar t google-chrome-stable-current_amd64.deb
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.xz

With a minor alteration to the slackBuild we can get back on track. (NB. I have created a source control file for the slackBuild first so that you can roll back if things go wrong.)

mkdir RCS
ci -l google-chrome.SlackBuild
ed <<- .
     r google-chrome.SlackBuild
     /lzma/ s/lzma/xz/g
     wq
ci -l google-chrome.SlackBuild

Using the above Chrome will be installed in /opt/google/chrome so you will need to add this to your PATH if you want to start Chrome easily from the command line. e.g.

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/google/chrome

And I am now able to watch Eurosport on Slackware.

Clifford W Fulford
20 January 2016.