My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: chromium (Page 14 of 20)

Chromium 59 – a security update

chromium_iconGoogle released chrome/chromium 59.0.3071.86 earlier this week. This was accompanied by a rather big list of security updates.
Taken from the Red Hat Security Advisory: “Multiple flaws were found in the processing of malformed web content. A web page containing malicious content could cause Chromium to crash, execute arbitrary code, or disclose sensitive information when visited by the victim. (CVE-2017-5070, CVE-2017-5071, CVE-2017-5072, CVE-2017-5073, CVE-2017-5074, CVE-2017-5075, CVE-2017-5076, CVE-2017-5077, CVE-2017-5078, CVE-2017-5079, CVE-2017-5080, CVE-2017-5081, CVE-2017-5086, CVE-2017-5082, CVE-2017-5083, CVE-2017-5085)

Otherwise, Chromium did not receive new functionality that immediately jumps out at me, except that the Chrome Settings page has changed its look and feel to Google’s “Material Design“.

Remember when you want to compile Chromium yourself, you will need ninja and nodejs (fortunately ninja and nodejs are only needed for the compilation, not for actually running the browser).

The packages for chromium, and the chromium widevine CDM plugin, are available for Slackware 14.2 and -current in my repository or one of its mirrors:

Have fun! Eric

Last week’s package harvest and more

Last week I made my build server at home churn through a lot of packages, let me summarize what became available recently in my slackbuilds repository:

  • I added ‘NetworkManager-openvpn‘ which is a plugin for NM adding support for OpenVPN connections. I needed this for myself since I recently started using the services of Private Internet Access (PIA). All I needed in addition was the ZIP file with OpenVPN configurations. If you need more instructions about how to setup the PIA VPN let me know and I will wrote some more about that. I also added this plugin to my PLASMA5 Live Edition.
  • I upgraded ‘Handbrake‘ to 1.0.3 which also fixed the libvpx library error on -current.
  • I updated the Flash Player plugins for Mozilla and Chromium browsers to 25.0.0.127 (this is a security update).
  • I updated Chromium and its Widevine plugin to 57.0.2987.98. There is a slightly newer release out already but that will have to wait a bit.
  • I updated LibreOffice to 5.3.1 (packages for -current only but I will build them for 14.2 too).

I did more than that; I also updated the front page of my ‘bear’ server with the information that you can access it over secure HTTP (https), and added a link to my post about the CACert issue with Mozilla and Google browsers. Furthermore I added more detail about the dynamically generated ISOs for Slackware-current (the installation DVD and the Live Edition).

I will spend my next post writing about the new KDE 5_17.03 edition which I uploaded to my ‘ktown’ repository, but let me mention here that I already uploaded a new PLASMA5 variant of the Slackware Live Edition which contains a “work in progress” version of this new Plasma 5 release (work in progress because I decided to add more packages later). I did not mention that in any previous post.
Along with that Plasma 5 Live ISO I also uploaded a variant containing the very fresh MATE 1.18 (thanks to Willy for providing me with the tried & tested packages). So there is enough to play with 🙂
I am actually considering a new spin of the PLASMA5 Live ISO because it allows me to offer the complete KDE-5_17.03 including the Kdenlive non-linear video editor in the Live OS, along with the latest LibreOffice.

Enough for now, check out my follow-up post for the news about my new Plasma 5 ‘ktown’ release.

Have fun! Eric

I added Chromium 56 for Slackware 14.1 with a caveat

chromium_iconA while ago, Chromium 56 ‘stable’ was released. It took a while for me to release Slackware 14.1 packages because of a crash bug in XFCE (and probably other non-KDE desktops too). I have been trying to find ways around the crash and been looking for patches, but there does not seem to be a solution for Slackware 14.1 other than working around it and losing some functionality.

So, what’s the issue?

Chrome/Chromium can optionally store credentials (user accounts, passwords) that you type in to access online secure web sites. The Password Store is a sqlite database. On Linux, its location is “~/.config/chromium/Default/Login Data” for Chromium and  “~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Login Data” for Chrome.
Chromium/Chrome on Linux wants to store your online credentials in a safe way, but it does not have the code itself to encrypt its own Password Store. Instead, it tries to rely on the availability of an external encryption provider. On KDE desktop environment, it will use the KDE Wallet system, while on other desktops it will try to use Gnome Keyring. If none of these are found, then Chrome/Chromium will fall back to storing unencrypted passwords in the above sqlite file.

Coming back to Slackware 14.1: there is a bug in it – probably in glib2 because that is where the segmentation faults are reported – which prevents recent versions of Chromium from using the Gnome Keyring. Within seconds of accessing the first web page in Chromium on Slackware 14.1, the browser will crash if you are running XFCE or some other non-KDE desktop. Note that you can use Chromium just fine in KDE on Slackware 14.1!

This issue does not exist in Slackware 14.2 or -current, probably because all the package updates between 14.1 and 14.2 solved the underlying issue. Therefore this bug is not something that will be solved in the chromium code by reporting it to Google… it is a OS related bug.

This means, if you are running XFCE you have to prevent Chromium from trying to use gnome-keyring. I tried to enforce the use of kwallet when running XFCE but that did not work, so you need to entirely disable the use of an encryption provider by adding the parameter “–password-store=basic” to the chromium commandline. The consequence will be that your online passwords will be stored unencrypted and anyone who gets hold of a copy of that sqlite file, will be able to extract all your credentials.

So here are some strategies for working with Chromium and not get bitten by the gnome-keyring induced crashes and keep your passwords safely encrypted:

  1. Encrypt your homedirectory or even your complete filesystem. With your files encrypted (using a password only you know) you reduce the risk of having Chromium store your credentials in plain-text in a sqlite file.
    Disk encryption using LUKS is something which Slackware supports during the installation. Full disk encryption is always recommended if you are using a laptop.
    If you did not opt for disk encryption during installation, but you still have more free disk space available than your /home directory tree is currently using, then you can create a new – encrypted – /home and move your existing data in there. This is an exercise that requires knowledge about cryptsetup and goes beyond the scope of this blog post.
  2. Switch to KDE. The kwallet storage is encrypted and it will not crash chromium like gnome-keyring does.
  3. Upgrade to Slackware 14.2. The gnome-keyring of this version of Slackware (and newer) will not crash chromium , so you can encrypt your online credentials in XFCE too.

And here is a chromium configuration file for Slackware 14.1 which will detect your Desktop Environment and will automatically add the parameter “–password-store=basic” to Chromium’s commandline for you if you are not using KDE. Copy the text below into a file called (for instance): “/etc/chromium/10-passwordstore.conf”:

# Use the basic (un-encrypted) password store,
# unless we are running KDE:
if [ ! "$XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP" = "KDE" ]; then
 CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --password-store=basic"
fi

Encrypting the passwords of your online identities will not make you 100% safe of course… even when your passwords are encrypted, Chrome/Chromium will make them plainly visible inside a browser window, by visiting the URL chrome://settings/passwords .

Note 1: The Windows version of Chrome encrypts the passwords it stores in “%UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Login Data” because it makes use of a Windows API which requires the logged-in user’s password for the decryption.

Note 2: When you use the browser’s sync feature to store a copy of your online credentials in your Google Account, then those copies will be encrypted with your sync password, that only you know.

 

Download the Chromium packages for Slackware 14.1 (they were already available for 14.2 and -current for some time) from a mirror like these:

Have fun! Eric

Chromium 56, LibreOffice 5.2.5

libreoffce_logoI had rebuilt the libreoffice-5.2.4 packages for Slackware -current last week, because library updates in Slackware had broken the spreadsheet application ‘localc‘. And voila… not long afterwards the Document Foundation blog announced 5.2.5: “all users are invited to update to LibreOffice 5.2.5 from LibreOffice 5.1.6 or previous versions“. Today on the first of february, we can even witness the 5.3 release.

A list of the most significant new features of LibreOffice 5.3 has been published in a separate document (http://tdf.io/lo53features) and you are invited to watch a series of short videos (http://tdf.io/53vids) if you want to get a taste of what’s on the plate. Collaborative editing is the major highlight I guess. A detailed description of these new features is also available as a web page:  http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.

I am definitely not building packages right away for 5.3 but I did compile packages for 5.2.5 – albeit only for Slackware -current. I may or may not create these packages for Slackware 14.2 as well and then upgrade the -current package to 5.3. Depends on the other stuff I need to do.

These libreoffice packages are huge in size so please use a mirror for download, and take into account that only the master site and ‘bear’ will have the packages during the first 24 hours.

Note: the LibreOffice browser plugin (NPAPI based) has been removed in LibreOffice 4.4.0:  https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/killing-the-npapi-plugin/

chromium_iconOn another note, Chromium (and Chrome) 56 ‘stable’ was released. It’s nice to test the HTML5 feature set on a site like HTML5test and see that it is at the top of all the browsers up there (517 points, only Chrome 56 for Windows scores better because it supports speech synthesis).

Packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current are now available from my repository. No ETA for Slackware 14.1 packages, and perhaps it is time for people still using Chromium on 14.1 to upgrade to 14.2?

As always, here are some common download sites:

Have fun! Eric

Chromium 54 packages

chromium_iconA new release of the Chromium source code was made available earlier this week. For me this is the first Chromium 54 package and unfortunately the SlackBuild script needed a lot of rework. Google is quite “dynamic” when it comes to developing and discarding in-house tools. The change from “gyp” to “gn” to generate the “ninja” makefiles was not trivial to incorporate into my build script. But I think I did it right, and I hope that no functionality has been lost in the new chromium package.

Packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current are now available from my repository. I’ll try to find time to make packages for Slackware 14.1 too, but a new set of Plasma 5 packages has a higher priority.

I hope to get up to speed after the weekend, and will try to release a new set of Live ISOs containing the new Plasma 5 after I have packaged that.

Cheers, Eric

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