Today, in a spare hour between work and kids coming home, I thought installing the latest 64bit dev-build of Google’s Chrome/ium browser. I downloaded the google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb and first did:
alien -r google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb
It told me I should use ‘–scripts’, so I did:
alien -r google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb --scripts
This resulted in an rpm file. Trying to install it, there were a lot of dependency conflicts. I checked if libs were there, they were, package versions high enough, so I forced the install.
Next thing I know, everything stopped working. One permission error after another. I could not find where the problem was, so reinstalled all Xorg (no keyboard, no mouse, so Xorg?), kdm (errors about permissions in /home), avahi (daemon failed) and a couple of others.
During install I suddenly noticed SuSEconfig setting the permissions of / to 755 (wrong permissions 700). All ended up working as it should.
So the generated rpm sets the permissions of / to read-write-search for root only. That explained the erroring.
The motto: this is an example of things that can happen to your system if you go for the latest and greatest, not minding to force your system to go there.
Question: is there a way I could fix the deb or rpm? I know there is, but how?