Call for testing: chromium-browser deb to snap transition

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269

I concur. I proposed a fix for it.

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270

I have the Chromium beta channel snap installed. Am I safe to install the chromium-browser apt package to get the fix for missing x-www-browser and gnome-www-browser?

271

It is impossible create shortcuts for webapps with Chromium Snap, one of the best features of this Chorme’s web browsers.

272

there is a workaround described in:


 also 
 better file a launchpad bug (if there isnt one already)

273

Yes, the chromium-browser apt package won’t alter the chromium snap installation if it’s already installed.

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274

There is one: bug #1732482.

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275

Thanks! i find the bug report as @oSoMoN post. But the bug refer only to desktop icon, it does not create the menu icon too. The normal beheavior is create a menu icon in show apps too. I don’t know if the two problems are related.

276

New fun discovery: jupyter-notebook doesn’t work with snapified chromium.

$ sudo apt install jupyter-notebook
$ jupyter-notebook
[I 14:59:35.624 NotebookApp] Serving notebooks from local directory: /home/mg
[I 14:59:35.624 NotebookApp] The Jupyter Notebook is running at:
[I 14:59:35.624 NotebookApp] http://localhost:8888/?token=a4a2d5dfeaf5a426507e887f3909cf787b3426e51a7d2954
[I 14:59:35.624 NotebookApp]  or http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=a4a2d5dfeaf5a426507e887f3909cf787b3426e51a7d2954
[I 14:59:35.624 NotebookApp] Use Control-C to stop this server and shut down all kernels (twice to skip confirmation).
[C 14:59:35.643 NotebookApp] 
    
    To access the notebook, open this file in a browser:
        file:///home/mg/.local/share/jupyter/runtime/nbserver-780941-open.html
    Or copy and paste one of these URLs:
        http://localhost:8888/?token=a4a2d5dfeaf5a426507e887f3909cf787b3426e51a7d2954
     or http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=a4a2d5dfeaf5a426507e887f3909cf787b3426e51a7d2954
Gtk-Message: 14:59:36.204: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 14:59:36.205: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
[780975:780975:0525/145936.220624:ERROR:edid_parser.cc(102)] Too short EDID data: manufacturer id
Atidaroma esamoje narơyklės sesijoje.

and then a Chromium window opens with

Ekrano%20nuotrauka%20i%C5%A1%202020-05-25%2015-00-31
Ekrano nuotrauka iơ 2020-05-25 15-00-31.png957×700 46.6 KB

This is not a show-stopper because you can click on one of those localhost:8888 URLs and get it open, but it is a papercut.

(I wonder why they use a file in ~/.local/share instead of always opening the localhost URL?)

277

Found out why:

This avoids putting the authentication token into a command-line
argument to launch the browser, where it’s visible to other users.

278

This would work if jupyter didn’t serve files from a “hidden” folder, e.g. ($HOME/jupyter), using the home interface.

279

I just switched from apt sources to the snap version of chromium. Bookmarks and profiles and some other previous data are there. However, history and saved passwords are not.

How do I get all my data to be used by the snap instance of chromium? I read in several places that the original profile will be “imported” from $HOME/.config/chromium. But where to should this import go, where does the snap version have its profile folder(s)?

I already tried snap disconnect chromium:password-manager-service mentioned above, with the result: No connections to disconnect

280

The chromium snap stores its profile in ~/snap/chromium/current/.config/chromium/.
Try moving that directory out of the way, or deleting it entirely (with the not running), and run chromium again. Does this import your full profile?

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281

I’m not sure about history, but passwords are usually kept in the system keyring (gnome-keyring-daemon), so you should be able to access them if you re-connect chromium to password-manager-service.

Yes, that’s the problems: it’s disconnected, and therefore can’t see your saved passwords. The fix is to connect, not disconnect.

282

Thank you both, @oSoMoN and @mgedmin! A combination of both of your hints helped resolve the issue for me:

  • I connected chromium to the password-manager-service
  • I removed snap’s chromium’s profile folder in ~/snap/chromium/current/.config/chromium/
  • I copied my original chromium profile folder from $HOME/.config/chromium to ~/snap/chromium/current/.config/chromium/, essentially replacing it
  • Additionally, I had to remove the extra Exec parameter --password-store=basic from my chromium.desktop file. I put that there yesterday as per another hint from this thread.

All of that together seemed to have done the trick, finally. I hope the old profile folder doesn’t mess up chromium in the long-run.

Merely removing snap’s chromium’s profile folder (instead of replacing/overwriting it as described above; otherwise having done all of the above) did not work for me, however. In this case, snap’s chromium would not import anything from the previously installed chromium version for me, not even profiles or bookmarks.

@oSoMoN: Thank you especially for mentioning the path ~/snap/chromium/current/.config/chromium/! I had searched in ~/snap/chromium/current/ before, but it didn’t occur to me to look for a hidden folder in there :man_facepalming:. I couldn’t find this documented anywhere – and due to this forum’s weird lazy-loading, I didn’t see yesterday that you had posted this in February already.

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283

It took me some time to grok this too. Basically, each snap’s ~/snap/NAME/{revision, current} directory is your home directory for that snap version, with the file layout exactly the same as the “real” home directory.

284

Yes, that way you can call

sudo snap disconnect <snapname>:home

for any application that you do not trust and want to prevent to access your personal data. the app still has a home dir to use but can not access anything in the actual $HOME to steal documents :wink:

3 Likes
285

@oSoMoN In this week’s Desktop Team Updates - Monday 6th July 2020 - #3 by oSoMoN, you noted

When that rolls out, will it get connected for existing chromium installs?

286

I am trying to run chromium (snap version - it is all that is available) on an LXD container in Ubuntu 18.04, but not using X display :0. However it always fails.

$ DISPLAY=:10 openbox --startup chromium
mkdir: cannot create directory '/run/user/1000': Permission denied
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
[22215:22215:0706/113629.960979:ERROR:browser_main_loop.cc(1473)] Unable to open X display.

The directory /run/user/1000 already exists and contains snapd-session-agent.socket so I think that is not a problem.

All of these fail with the same error message:

$ DISPLAY=:10 chromium 
$ chromium --display :10
$ chromium --display ':10'
$ chromium --display 10

These work fine:

DISPLAY=:10 openbox --startup xeyes
DISPLAY=:10 xeyes

and are displayed in a Xephyr instance as intended.

Firefox also succeeds.

This ALSO succeeds in displaying a window in the Xephyr instance:

$ DISPLAY=:10 openbox --startup chromium-browser

but it is just a dummy window, not a browser. I guess that is intentional.

287

it definitely is 
 no snap can write directly to /run/user/$uid typically XDG_RUNTIME_DIR points to a confined snap specific dir for security reasons:

$ snap run --shell chromium -c /usr/bin/env|grep XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000/snap.chromium

EDIT: here are some wrappers i used quite a while ago to build a kiosk based Ubuntu Core system using chromium:

https://github.com/ogra1/dashkiosk-client-browser/blob/master/xwayland-dashkiosk-launch

perhaps that gets you some ideas to work around the issue 


288

That’s a good question. According to the documentation, « Auto-connect indicates that the interface will be connected by default when the snap is first installed ». That seems to imply that the auto-connection won’t happen on update/refresh, only on first install.