Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900 (DON'T TRY! UNUSABLE EVEN THOUGH POSSIBLE)
 

THIS FIRST POST IS UPDATED AND I ADD TO THIS THE LATEST INSTRUCTIONS OF RUNNING CHROMIUM 57 ON N900!

Here are instructions to get 0day wholes having chromium 57 browser to be installed on N900 if you really need it (as I do for whatsapp and instagram).

WARNING: PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS OF USING FIREJAIL WITH CHROMIUM HAVE BEEN REMOVED CAUSE KERNEL DOESN'T SUPPORT FIREJAIL FULLY. ALSO IT MAY BE THAT THERE IS NO SECURITY BENEFITS OF USING CHROMIUM IN KIOSK MODE.

After installing jessie on ED from the link in this instruction page

https://wiki.maemo.org/Easy_Debian/L..._Debian_Jessie

by juiceme go Debian Chroot and:

apt-get update

groupadd crontab

- Otherwise for me it throws "unknown user group in statoverride" error and prevents from installing. I searched a lot about it and there are different possibilities to resolve it. Most common is to remove /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride and some say also to remove the /var/lib/dpkg/lock. Some instructed to search for a certain line with crontab and remove that only. But it was said that the securest way is to add the groub crontab with groupadd to prevent from harming the system. I have decided to follow that cause have had so many problems and not know if some were because of removing the whole statoverride. If there is a better solution let me know.

apt-get install ca-certificates openssl libcurl3

Next one (installing netsurf with the instructions by juiceme) is optional but because I do not know if this added something which made chromium work better I install it first. Installing after chromium did not work at least once.

Follow the instructions of getting and and installing netsurf from juiceme.

https://wiki.maemo.org/Easy_Debian/L..._Debian_Jessie

apt-get install leafpad (or use what ever you prefer and is better)

leafpad /etc/apt/sources.list


Add to sources and save if you need for something firejail sandbox. Don't use it with chromium. It doesn't add security but may even weaken it with chromiums own sandbox preferences.To use it with chromium was just an idea which didn't carry far.

deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-backports main

apt-get update

apt-get install -t jessie-backports firejail


And now to installing Chromium:

apt-get install apt-transport-https

cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d

Get mavericks jessie repository list for odroid:

wget https://oph.mdrjr.net/meveric/source...ssie-main.list

- There is also a list for mavericks jessie-backports where some may find usefull stuff for some things but atleast once when I tried to install chromium the backports list enabled I got lots of dependency errors and couldn't anymore install chromium. I also tried installing it from official jessie backports which was also a mistake and had to reinstall image cause didn't know how to fix things. So get for this only jessie main list.

wget -O- http://oph.mdrjr.net/meveric/meveric.asc | apt-key add -

apt-get update

apt-get install chromium-browser-odroid

Now if you know how to get N900 keyboard work properly on jessie do that (probably with Xbindkeys fix icon and instructions on ED wiki, I haven't got that part working yet).

Close Debian Chroot and fire up LXDE desktop.

- Now if you have overclocked and made swap adjustments I suggest to change the max cpu to 805 and change swap to default settings except maybe the echo "30" > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. I have CSSU devel, Kernel Power 53 and had overclocked to 900 and had swappolube proposed settings and they worked well untill firing up chromium. Then device booted.

Start chromium either from Run or from the menu.

- It should be in menu if you installed jessie by putting the right path in /home/user/.chroot. ED finds and uses the image from MyDocs even without the path but there are some things which do not work.

Let chromium open up and do not try to use it before you see the cpu meter showing low. Do not just look and wait but do something, read or have a coffee. It takes couple of minutes the couple first times and untill you have made the right settings. Then it will work about like iceweasel.

After it has loaded shut the chromium. This was needed only for chromium to make right files. Not sure if the next one is neccessary or is sulu image such that the rights are not that restricted but according to Easy Debbie wiki instruction page you need to give chromium access to here in chroot:

chown -R user /home/user/.cache/chromium

chown -R user /home/user/.config/chromium

Now it should be certain that your settings stick. Open chromium again (and wait and wait untill cpu is down) and then adjust settings. When you get settings open bookmark it with SET (short name).

VERY IMPORTANT SETTING:

Change the page where chromium opens to chrome://chrome-urls

Change that to be also the home button page.

Chromium opens much faster and it is usefull to have a very light page under home button.

Show bookmarks bar (you need it).

Make a user

Then go to content settings and bookmark that too with short name.

Disable images (for now)

Disable flash always (and for good)

Disable microphone, camera, and everything else you want. I also disabled programs to do anything after closing.

After this it is maybe good thing to make what ever magic you do to free ram on your device. Open chromium this time from run with 'firejail chromium'. Then google data saver chrome (could not find it from webstore otherwise) and click the link you find. First time webstore loads longer, next times it's ok.

Install data saver and click the icon to start it.

Google xtab and do the same as with data saver. When xtab is installed click the icon, click the arrow on the box to change open pages and then select more in the bottom. Type 2 on the box. Otherwise you will soon loose the game with chromium making extra processes for each tab.

Now you may click settings from bookmark bar and go to clear cache/browsing. When you get there bookmark that too with short name. Clear your history.

If you want to try to make it work even better you may try using chrome://flags. I tried almost everything but can't really say what would really work. One friend once said that the more flags you put the more the browser needs to read settings for each page when opening. It seemed that way with this N900. In internet you can find with 'flags for faster chrome' or 'reduce ram with flags on chrome'. I decided not to use them after all. Should be a proper machine with monitoring enabled to really see effects on ram and cpu and loading times before using.


Using chromium without LXDE desktop

You can launch chromium straight from xterm in Hildon with 'debbie chromium'.

There comes also all kinds of errors when you launch it like this. If you know and find out how to make chromium to work the same way as netsurf does when launched from chroot (right sized window, able to write and click stuff well, no errors) then pliiz tell me.

For now when you launch it you can click stuff and get them opened but you can't write unless you first press shutdown button and when the menu appears click somewhere in chromium to make it disappear and then you can type. But then to be able to click some things you need to exit the ED with ctrl backspace and then come back. And for some things (as editing xtab from icon menu) you just can't make it work.

One workaround is that when chrome is launched from LXDE install chrome input tools. You can there select languages and then you can use virtual keyboard without need to all the time change mode when chromium is launched from xterm. Chromium is much faster when launched from xterm.

Launching chromium to kiosk mode. It may give some performance benefits. About adding security it may give nothing extra.

In terminal type:

debbie chromium --kiosk http://www.google.com

Put whatever webpage url, both http and https works. Can be used also from the Run box in LXDE start menu.

It will open a maximized window without any chromium settings top bar which are not in use in kiosk mode. You (the user) can't use them (not sure how it is with what webpage can or can't in this mode).

Any help on this matter (getting chromium to work better) is welcomed!

ALERT AND CAUTION: USE THIS BROWSER ONLY TO ACCESS CERTAIN PLACES YOU OTHERWISE YET CAN'T WITH N900!!!

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

THIS POST IS OLDER THAT THE FIRST POST ON THIS THREAD AND JUST DESCRIBES HOW I TRIED TO MAKE CHROMIUM WORK FIRST.

From this thread I started and there may be some usefull information to be found. I tried install it but didn't work.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/v...?f=63&t=121195

Then I found another thread and followed this path.

First added from this guy the jessie main repository to /etc/apt/sources.list

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=5908

Then installed from there chromium-browser-odroid

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=12350
installing chromium-browser-odroid

Opening chroot:

If you try to start it from debbie chroot with just chromium it says have to add --no-sandbox and then it opens it to own window without lxde desktop and to developer mode. But it wont work well and shows the top bar of hildon on top of the window. If you here open an incognito window the previous is left underneath and you should close it.

Opening through desktop:

Open debian desktop, open run and type chromium. It will show a box which says "Profile error occured and can't read your preferences". But it will open the google search page after long time. It is helpful to have a cpu diagram on the bottom of desktop to follow when it's done before continuing.

The search works, preferences opens and can be changed but I think they are not saved. When you open chromium chroot you see all kinds of errors which should probably be fixed.

Also was able to search from webstore but when tried to add extension (Ublock addblocker to help pages to load) it was unable to unzip the package.

I managed to open one newspaper (www.il.fi) but with the heavier one (www.is.fi) it first shows the news but when the loading continues it in the end fails with a window Aw, snap!

I tried to clear cache and use incognito window (as chromium suggested) but no difference. Also here in desktop if you open the incognito window the previous window stays behind and you should close it.

Also tried (as was said in the thread https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=12350 by the builder) to start chromium with --use-gl=egl but it gives many errors of missing stuff (well seen when starting in chroot with that).

Some in that thread had managed to get chromium to work in odroid only after downgrading libnss3. So I tried to look for help to that and found this thread.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...rading-problem

Those instructions were too scary so search more and found this.

https://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-dow...age-in-ubuntu/

As instructed there I did this sudo apt-cache showpkg libnss3 and stopped there my journey when saw mention of dependencies and libc6. I don't know what it is but it has been giving me grey hair and have made me to install debbie and jessie again many times. There always comes problems with libc6 when I try to install something. I have now working jessie with netsurf and I don't know how to save/make image of my present setup so I didn't try to downgrade libnss3 to see what happens.

I still searched for how to prevent package from upgrading again for future needs and found it from here.

https://www.ostechnix.com/3921-2/

In the end I used this to see the version of current libc6

sudo apt-cache show libc6 | grep Versio

But cause I don't understand these things it didn't give me any usefull knowledge.

I believe someone could know how to fix the errors and problems on this chromium, but I'm not sure how i could be get enough slim to work in N900. Addblocker would help loading the pages, but is there any extensions (or mods to about:config) to prevent pictures of downloading or downgrading their quality and what would be best: to have ability to load a certain picture on demand with low quality when needed.

Probably some of you guys know how to make a browser use less ram and run faster by adjusting the config (I tried to adjust microb or was it fennec with greasemonkey scripts and it was a disaster). But it would take probably a lot of time. Just wanted to share this experiment if someone likes to try and maybe try to get it work. I don't have extra swap and on another thread someone talked about watchdog configs to help to prevent freeze.

With this chromium needs a lot of patience and no extra apps or windows open.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

News site that opened but wasn't really able to use scroll, just by clicking and giving time - a lot!

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Makes you snap.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Climbing the tree from the wrong end. After six hours useless efforts of modding chromium settings underdstood that chromium does not have rights to write or read /home/user/.config. /.config I used chown -R user:users chromium and then deleted Web Data and Preferences folders and the first time access to chromium without error window. Have to see if could now get the settings to stay. Chrome://flags has many possibilities and about:config too. Probably will have success on ruining the whole browser but gonna try. I made to chromium a profile "LinuxNinja". The icon looks like the ninja in the C64 Bruce Lee which you can strike down easily but it just keeps coming back. Feeling that ninja with this chromium.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

If anyone can help me with this: I would like to get chromium to open from choot terminal as netsurf does, straight to own window without LXDE desktop. Now it opens from there only as root, but only if I flag it with --no-sandbox. But then I don't have text input working at all in the browser. Have managed to make lots of setting mods but getting it run without desktop as a normal user would make probably a needed difference how it runs. Anyone?

Do not recommend testing the browser except for efforts to fix. Not usable as such.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

You are treading in deep waters now, as I think nobody has tried these things yet. It is pretty much pushing the limits of the device.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Yes, I can feel the limits of this device. Waiting waiting with full cpu, page not responding, kill or wait? I'll wait, thank you. Chrome webstore loads like 5-10 minutes. But already installed Data Saver and One Tab extensions.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Almost a decade ago I was not patient enough to use IceWeasel on debian image.

You must be a very calm guy ;)
And definitely admired (for your curiosity/efforts/endurance/...) :)

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Firstly
Your post #2 here Maemish ...
in explaining what and how you did what you did...
is well done. Very...
So well done in fact, it could pretty much be used to retrace exactly what you did to achieve the results you got...
Also to be used as a platform for study from and extrapolate from, to get potentially ..other results.

Secondly, the dilemma with pushing chromium is that the demands of chromium and especially most sites nowadays...are just too heavy, too demanding ...for the n900 to handle.
Leaner browsers and methods of paring down the sites they visit so it doesn't overwhelm the n900 in question ...is a better answer.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

I recall using WAP gateways back in the 90s and early/mid 2000s for my candybar phone, Handspring Visor, and Zaurus.
I would be surprised to find a way to process, lets say pre-digest a complicated website faithfully enough to do all of the government and commerce stuff we want; or even just visit a mainstream or pop news site get the crappy 30cm of NoScript links I need to click to authorize.
but there simply has to be a way to clean up or make a formatted static page proxy we could have running on an r-pi or other server we jack into an ADSL line or hosted virtual instance of Debian or favorite flavor.
The web is borken not the N900; I would love to help build an easy r-pi and downloadable OS image as well as a setup to give us the adapter we need to get back the full function of our N900, form youtube, to torrents, to web browsing; the tools are there but we need to move the work off of our phone if we can to fix the bloat.
Realistically I should be able to use a TI-83 and a serial to BT adapter with maybe an attiny to convert the logic to surf the web, but web devs got lazy and bloat everything by offloading to dozens of outside links to render a site perfectly for your screen to the point where we need to chew that crap til it takes 8 cores at 4ghz and a late model GPU to just view the modern web at normal speed.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

COMPLETELY agree with you Mr. Tool
or do you go by your first name Bike?
Or isitalloneword Mr Biketool?

Anywho...
big humongous+1 to all you said...

And...concerning the internet being borkened ...
I agree as well...

In fact cue the the "borking" theme music !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2-gDQDYcTA

"Bork! Bork! Bork!"

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Changed the One tab extension to another which makes chromium to use only one tab. Now if I just would find a way to start from chroot terminal chromium as a normal user and to its own window without needing to start desktop.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

So reading instruction page for easy debbie sorted out how to start chromium to it's own window from terminal. From xterm typind debbie or debbie-sue and when the chroot environment opens typing chromium. But it still has the problem that there is no text input available. Now I found from some place online that deleting ibus would do the trick but that I would not want to do and not sure what is really the case here. And another is that chromium should open a little smaller window so that the top bar of Hildon would be in use. If someone want's to guide me through this I would appreciate.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Hmm... I'm not sure about the keyboard input thing but maybe you can/should/would like to try this.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

I'm not willing to start to mess around with lxsession configures cause at the moment the chromium has text input when started inside lxde. I do not want to miss that too. I tried using the "Set Deb HW Keys" script given with a launcher but it did not help. FN is the (Hah! Googled it to be sure cause don't want to show as a newbie and found out that pressing long makes the same as using key with FN! Well how about that! Has been so difficult to get 1 and other blue characters far left!) is the left arrow and RETURN is the same as ENTER, right? So I tried first launching the script and then opening chromium both from debbie and debbie-sue as a normal user to own window and then trying typing and using FN and ENTER but no text input.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Reason why I do this is partly this. I want to use whatsapp with my N900. First messages already sent. But with LXDE desktop it is a bit too sluggish.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

If the device would bare 1150 overclocking and would have swap tweaks I think this chromium would be a winner. But I drive -97 Nissan Micra with 1,3L engine so I am used to not moving too fast.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Still not got keyboard working on window mode. Or it is working: it writes everything to chroot terminal instead of chromium! Have tried different xbindkeys workarounds as istructed on easy debbie instruction page, tried to with script giving xbindkeys to all applications, tried starting debbie with different modes: debbie, debbie-sue. Also noticed while was gonna post image with whatsapp that window mode does not have access to home folder and mydocs.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Still not sure about the problem but maybe you can try another thing: change the lines in debbie and debbie-sue files that says UBUSER=$USER to UBUSER=$UBUSER or something like that. But be aware that doing this you will get root access so be careful what you are doing. As always... :)

Background: when I was playing with easy ubuntu years ago I noticed that I did not have keyboard input in terminal when chrooted into LXDE. The above hack solved that for me. But maybe that isn't the case in connection with your chromium input problem...

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Ööööö, change (How? With leafpad?) in debbie and debbie-sue files (What files? Where?). I mean the construction of linux aplications and where all the files are spread in the terminal landscape are not known to me. But thanks for helping.

I was just thinking myself that I have given with chown -R user:users rights to chromium in the /home/user/.config. Should I give some otherway rights to chromium (chmod) or give other rights or something? Now the normal user can write through LXDE and have access to /home/MyDocs but not outside LXDE. On easy debbie instructions there are a lot of text which could possibly help but when one does not understand...

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Well, leafpad could be a solution for that...
So you wrote that you launch commands: debbie and debbie-sue. These are the files that maybe needed to be modified. To be able to modify them you most probably will need root access.
The easiest way to find these files if you search for them for example with the following command:
This will spit you the path to the files.

You can change rights of course (chown is enough I think) but for me it would require many modifications and I do not know exactly what other files it would want to write so for me root access is best on kali because it solves a lot of things for me but need extra caution. Quid pro quo...

Edit:// It is nice to see that on other languages then mine the "öööööööö" is a very valid expression... :)

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

If you havent already tried, you can try the simple keyboard focus fix for bluemaemo from http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=453
to narrow it down

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Try, if you can set the keyboard focus to the Chromium window via wmctrl! [1]
I fear however, that it won't work in this case. [2]

As for the "Aw, snap" problem, I believe this happens when Chromium runs out of RAM.


[1] https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.ph...54#post1462554
[2] https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.ph...88#post1538288

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! @pythoneye2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Both keyboard works and have also access to MyDocs in window mode which is a must mode.

Just sent a picture with whatsapp to my friends!

Edit: The shutdown button trick has to be done each time you access debian if you have switches to Hildon side.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

So I got also Instagram to work on chromium 57.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

First I tried to use desktop instagram but for that I needed to subscribe into google account in chromium. As settings I made that don't save anything for syncing. The desktop instagram didn't work so I wanted to unsubscribe from google account. It has a checkbox do I wan't to save synced information. I think I have made the same mistake with some other device. I thought do I wan't google remembers in cloud the saved information and I do not. But what it means that if you don't keep the information it wipes everything from your browser: extensions, settings, bookmars, and it seems something from the device too. Now in a position I have to probably flash my device if the backup I made with good settings won't help. Instagram can be used like with pc: chromium developer mode, I use iPhone 4 as a device profile, then it gives the button to load the pictures.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Edited the first post and put thorough instructions how I have made chromium 57 to work bareably and also links how to get latest jessie and netsurf 3.8 installed (instructions by juiceme). All help to things described in the first post are welcomed!

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Firejail relies on kernel features like namespaces and seccomp which aren't available in the Fremantle kernel so it won't really work as intended. If I recall correctly, it also uses capabilities which should be available so it might offer some protection but not nearly as much as a fully featured Firejail.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Have you something to say about the kiosk mode? Or what would be good parameters to start the firejail with?

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

I haven't been able to find much information on kiosk mode but from what I can tell it is exactly that: a mode designed to run Chromium for public kiosks/terminals, normally intended to run a single website or web app. In other words, start the browser automatically, run full screen and hide all controls (buttons, menus, etc) from the user. Any additional security layers that it provides would be to protect from someone with physical access to the device and it makes little sense to use it for general web browsing on a device you own. There might be a slight memory advantage as it doesn't load user controls.

For something like Chromium, I probably wouldn't bother using Firejail. The Chromium developers are very hot on security and it's already heavily sandboxed. They already do system call filtering with seccomp-bpf (if the kernel provides it) and I'm pretty sure they already drop unneeded capabilities. Don't forget that excessive sandboxing can break stuff. Google know their product better than the Firejail developer so I would just trust them on this one.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Oki. Gonna update instruction according and remove information concerning using firejail with chromium. Gonna also move information about kiosk mode after I try it with what I need. For some reasonh I still think there could be benefit of using it.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

NOW ...
That is exactly the right perspective Maemish.
Always follow that credo with our nxx0's
"For some reasonh I still think there could be benefit of using it."

one never knows what one or another or a bunch of folks may come up with as a consequence of what we find.
What may not work right now...may work in the future due to someone finding something that makes the difference...
Or...
what one works on now...even though it is decided as inconclusive ...as a result at that time...
may in fact enable some minor or major understanding or breakthrough in some other endeavour completely different from what was started on.

Keep that philo in mind ...and all things open and all possible viable and all options credible...
as you peer at problems and puzzles here..
and tinker away...

So...stop the "trying" to fit in...
Just keep at it ...
and by default..
you are as Maemoan as it gets.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Should I now then change my name again? Not anymore Maemish but a real Maemoan? Naa, I have started to like it. You are like a priest who baptized me and gave me a name. I will carry it proudly.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

Instructions updated and corrected.

Re: Chromium 57 on ED Jessie on N900
 

argh...
no...nononono....
terrible terrible hardly a priest baptizing ...

more like a minor imp ...tempting you down the road to eternal Maemation ...