Friday, March 3, 2017

Fix Failed To Fetch Google Chrome Repository After Google Dropped Support For Its Browser On Linux 32bit

Fix Failed To Fetch Google Chrome Repository After Google Dropped Support For Its Browser On Linux 32bit


As announced back in December, Google stopped supporting Google Chrome on 32-bit Linux starting this month. Users running a 32bit Linux distribution are advised to stop using Google Chrome because, while it will continue to work, it will no longer receive any updates (including no security fixes).

The 32-bit build configurations for Chromium continues to be supported, so you can still use Chromium browser on 32-bit Linux distributions.


Because the official Google Chrome repository no longer provides 32-bit packages, 64-bit Ubuntu/Debian users will notice an error when updating the software sources, which looks as follows:
Failed to fetch http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/dists/stable/Release 
Unable to find expected entry main/binary-i386/Packages in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)
Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

To fix this error on Ubuntu/Debian 64-bit, the repository must be specifically set for 64-bit only - this can be done by adding "[arch=amd64]" after "deb" in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list. To do this automatically, you can use the following command:
sudo sed -i -e s/deb http/deb [arch=amd64] http/ "/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list"

Update: this file is changed on each Google Chrome update and it looks like theres no way around that (changing /opt/google/chrome/cron/google-chrome or /etc/default/google-chrome doesnt affect this) so until Google changes this in its package, youll need to apply the fix above after every Google Chrome update. If you have a solution for this, let us know in the comments!

Update 2: A workaround would be to make the .list file immutable, so it cant be changed by any Google Chrome updates, by using "sudo chattr +i /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list" (which can be reversed using: "sudo chattr -i /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list") but this is not ideal and you should change this file back once Google fixes this on their end.

Update 3: this bug was fixed upstream in version 49.0.2623.87 (thanks to Segio Rus for the comment!), so updating to Google Chrome 49.0.2623.87 should fix this issue.

On 32-bit, you should remove the repository and stop using Google Chrome since it wont receive any security updates:
sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list
sudo apt-get remove google-chrome


thanks to darkfur93 @ reddit for the info (and to Bruce Ingalls for the tip)


Available link for download

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