Love Starbucks but don’t love IE and Firefox? Starbucks may not love you back.

Lately I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend in emails I get from Starbucks. For some reason the images wouldn’t load in my Gmail on Chromium, even when I used their link to view the message in my web browser. I would always have to fire up Firefox just to drag the link into a tab to open the page. I finally got sick of it and sent them an email about it on Saturday.

The emails I get from My Starbucks Rewards always come in with broken images, even when I click the link to view it in a browser tab. The issue occurs in Chromium (16.0.912.75 (Developer Build 116452 Linux) Debian wheezy/sid) and Google Chrome (15.0.874.121), both with my ad blocking software disabled, but not in my alternate browsers: Firefox (9.01) and Opera (11.60). I really hate having to open another browser just to see the images in your emails.

Yesterday I got a response from them that made me wonder how much I want to keep giving Starbucks my business. rather than copy and paste their response I took a screenshot so you can see I’m not changing what they sent.

Yes, you read that correctly. “Unfortunately the website and other elements such as the e-mails we send are only designed to work with the correct coding that Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox use.” I sent back a response pointing out that it’s 2012 and not everyone uses Firefox or IE, and I don’t expect a reply. I actually had to take a bit of time to make sure that I wasn’t coming off as a geeky jerk, and I planned on just letting the matter drop completely but last night I decided to share their email with our readers.

When I tried to get a screen capture of one of their broken emails the emails displayed properly, but that’s no guarantee that they’ll always display properly. Consider this post a word to the wise.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Prevent duplicate lines in your Bash history

if you’re like me you frequently use the command line to run commands and you use the arrow keys to let you reuse commands in your Bash history without having to type them all out. You may even know that you can manually edit the history by editing the ~/.bash_history file. When I was an Ubuntu user I enjoyed the fact that if you reuse the last command it doesn’t add the command to the history file but since moving to LMDE with KDE I’ve noticed that for some odd reason the .bash_history file can get Jabba-sized as a new line is added every time you run something in the terminal, even if I’m reusing the last command I ran.

Today I did a quick search on DuckDuckGo and found a way to prevent adding duplicate lines to your .bash_history file. Before we do anything else let’s open your .bash_history and clean it up a bit. Close every app you have open that uses Bash commands, whether it’s Konsole, Terminal, Yakuake or a terminal app on your dock and open ~/.bash_history in your favorite text editor. Go through it and remove duplicate lines, including duplicates spread throughout your history file.  Save it, and make a new file called ~/.bashrc if it doesn’t exist already. You can also  edit /etc/bash.bashrc as root but I prefer to use a bash configuration file in my home directory simply to make it easier to edit as needed. Add this line to the file

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

Save it and relaunch your terminal app and open ~/.bash_history in your text editor, or if you haven’t closed it reload the file and you will see that the reuse of the last command didn’t result in a duplicate line, although using lines above it will get lines entered if they’re previous commands in the file.

You can see more ways to customize your terminal usage in Customizing the Terminal: 5 Configuration Settings in Bash that makes you a CLI Power User, just note that where they say to use a file called ~/.bash_profile you should instead use ~/.bashrc, or at least that’s what I had to do on LMDE with KDE 4.7.4.

[HOWTO] Fixing Samba sharing in LMDE

With all the goodness in Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) there are some problems, like the fact that sharing files and folders with Samba doesn’t work. Had I checked the Linux Mint Forums sooner I would have seen the fix for the problem in the Tutorials section, and since I’ve finally found it I wanted to share it here to help everyone else find it. The tutorial is written with GNOME’s Nautilus file manager in mind but it works just as well for KDE users like myself. I’m going to give both the GNOME and KDE versions of the first step but the rest of the steps work beautifully regardless which desktop environment you prefer. Please note that if you use Xfce as your DE I have no idea if the steps need to be changed to work with it.

1. Enable “Guest Access” in Samba
For some reason this is disabled by default in LMDE but it’s an easy fix for it. Open the Samba configuration file as root in your preferred text editor. If you use GNOME run this command in your terminal

gksu gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

If you’re a KDE user like me run this command in either your terminal or in the Run Command Interface

kdesudo kate /etc/samba/smb.conf

Once the file is open in your text editor add these two lines to the [global] section

usershare allow guests = yes
map to guest = Bad user

It doesn’t matter where within [global] you put those two lines. I put them at the bottom of the Misc. section (line 231) but you can put them right below the [global] section header around line 34. Once you have put the lines into the file save it and close it, then restart Samba by running this command in your terminal

sudo service samba restart

2. Add yourself to the correct usergroup
As things stand you won’t be able to create shared files and folders because you don’t have the right permissions. This is an easy fix by running this command in your terminal

sudo gpasswd -a your_user_name sambashare

Replace your_user_name with the name you use when logging into LMDE. Keep the terminal open because you’re not finished with it.

3. Install samba client packages
There are four packages you will need to install  on your system before you can set Samba to share files on your system. Run each line one line at a time in your terminal

sudo apt-get install gvfs-fuse
sudo apt-get install libsmbclient
sudo apt-get install smbclient
sudo apt-get install python-smbc

Now add yourself to the fuse group to make sure you have the permissions needed for actually using these packages

sudo gpasswd -a your_user_name fuse

again replacing your_user_name with your user name on the system.

4. Log out and back in for the group changes to take effect
That’s right, it’s that simple. If you’re running GNOME you may find that the “Create Share” button in Nautilus abruptly closes and your desktop will disappear but there’s no need to fear because it will return. There’s probably a bug filed with Debian about it but I haven’t seen it or a workaround for it yet. If you’re running KDE you don’t need to even worry about it because I didn’t see the glitch on my laptop.

Thanks to Linux Mint Forums user altair4 for writing the tutorial I found. You can find it, and other posts on the matter in the thread How To – Simple File Sharing in Mint on the Mint Forums.

Still need a last minute gift? How about a gift certificate from Penguin Gear?

‘Twas the Fried-day before Chrismukkuh and all through the house people were scrambling to find the perfect gift for a loved one.

Okay, I know there isn’t a rhyme, but time is getting pretty tight for finding those last gifts. Going to the mall is getting even more distasteful because of all of those other last minute shoppers but you don’t want to give people in your life an IOU. How about giving them a gift certificate for something from the Penguin Gear shop? They can be used anywhere on Spreadshirt, our partner site, even on custom printed items that you design yourself.

It’s great no-stress shopping, and even at this late date you’ll have something to give them when you exchange presents and it’s good on anything from Penguin Gear and Spreadshirt, even custom printed items and items that come out after the new year begins! It even comes with different designs to give your recipient even more to love.

Just place your order before 26 December 2011 and use coupon code LASTMINUTE2011. It may take up to 2 hours to process your gift certificate orders due to the number of orders Spreadshirt has to process, but once you place your order with your credit card, debit card or PayPal you can rest assured your gift list is finally finished.

Order your gift certificate at my Penguin Gear shop now!

[HOWTO] Install Dropbox on LMDE with Debian Testing with KDE SC 4.7.2

Dropbox is one of those apps that I’ve used for years and use it to store my personal web start page online so I can use it when I don’t have access to my laptop, such as when I’m surfing the web on my phone. Unfortunately when I made the upgrade to LMDE with Debian Testing and KDE SC 4.7.2 my Dropbox broke. The problem is that I’ve edited my start page a couple of times and haven’t had the time to upload it to Dropbox through their web front end.

The problem is that Dropbox depends on libnautilus-extension1 but I have libnautilus-extension1a installed. Today I finally did some digging and found out that you can install Dropbox by building it from the source code. Go ahead and download the tarball and extract it, then open a terminal window on the directory you extracted the tarball to. Before you can start compiling the code you’ll need to take care of the dependencies by running this command

sudo apt-get install libnautilus-extension-dev docutils-common docutils-doc python-docutils python-lxml python-pygments python-roman

Now you’re ready to compile the Dropbox code and get it installed. Run these lines one at a time in your terminal, fixing any problems as they come up

./configure
make
sudo make install

You shouldn’t have gotten any error messages so now you need to restart Nautilus, even if you’re running KDE. You can do this by running sudo killall nautilus in your terminal but if you’re running Compiz your system may lock up so just log out of your computer and log back in. When you log back in you should see the Dropbox icon in your system tray. if you haven’t had Dropbox working on your system before you’ll need to set it up, but since I did have it working it saw my settings and even started updating my files on the Dropbox server without my having to do a thing,

What about the KDE Dropbox?

Being a KDE user I definitely prefer to use Kfilebox, also known as Kdropbox, rather than the default Nautilus tools. I already had the DEB package for Kfilebox on my hard drive so I tried to install it, only to get told that the kdelibs5 dependency can’t be met. I tried downloading the source code for it and building it myself, once I had G++ installed, but it complained about not being able to find something in /usr/lib/libkdecore.so.5 and since I don’t have the time to chase it down today I’ll just stick with the normal Dropbox installation. If someone knows how to get Kfilebox installed please leave it in the comments.

[HOWTO] Run scripts in KDE before KDE starts

One annoying little things about being a KDE user, whether I’m running LMDE or any other version of KDE is that it seems to ignore my setting to leave my system’s NumLock setting (on) alone when it starts. The problem is that KDM, the KDE Desktop Manager and also known as the Login Manager, loads in before the main part of KDE does so the BIOS setting is already changed by the time KDE ignores the possibility of changing the setting. Thanks to the good folks over at Make Tech Easier I’ve found a trick that fixes the misbehavior.

KDM has its own startup script called Xsetup, and will execute anything in that file before KDE itself launches. To make sure KDE turns on the NumLock, or to make sure it stays on, you can install an app called numlockx and use the app to turn the NumLock on before the main part of KDE even loads. To do this just follow these steps:

• Install numlockx. You can do it via a package manager or open up a Konsole window and run sudo apt-get install numlockx .
• Open Xsetup as root by pressing Alt-F2 (or whatever key combination you’ve set to launch the Run  Command Interface) and run kdesudo kate /etc/kde4/kdm/Xsetup .
• At the bottom of the file* add numlockx on and save the file.

That’s really all there is to it. The next time you boot your system into KDE the NumLock will be enabled for you automatically. Please remember that anything you put into Xsetup will be run as root and will be available to any user who boots into KDE on your computer so be very careful not to put anything into that file that could break your system. But you’re not restricted to using Xsetup for things like turning on your NumLock. The article from Make Tech Easier uses the example of configuring your display settings before KDE starts, and I’m sure there are other things that could be done this way.

*-If your Xsetup includes the line

x/sbin/initctl -q emit login-session-start DISPLAY_MANAGER=kdm

you want to put whatever you’re adding to the file before this line.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Do you use the OxyXmas icons but can’t change the icon for Chromium on LMDE with KDE SC 4.7.2?

Earlier this week I installed the OxyXmas icons as part of my holiday decorations, but no matter what I did I couldn’t get the icon for Chromium to change. I finally looked at the settings in the Chromium desktop file (/usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop) and found the problem. There’s an icon for chromium-browser but not for chromium, which is how the browser is identified in LMDE. It turns out the fix is very simple.

• Download the OxyXmas tarball from KDE-Look.org if you don’t have it on your hard drive. Extract the tarball.
• Before creating the various icon sizes drill down to the OxyXmas/128x128/apps directory
• Copy the chromium-browser icon by manually copying it in Dolphin or by running cp chromium-browser.png chromium.png in the terminal
• Go back to the main OxyXmas directory
• In a terminal window working in the main oxyXmas directory run ./iconvert
• Install the icon theme via systemsettings or by copying the oxyXmas directory to /usr/share/icons/ or ~/.kde/share/icons (I prefer the latter)
• Open the System Settings dialog and go to Application Appearance > Icons and select the OxyXmas – OxySeasons Xmas-Theme and click Apply.

Voilà! You can now use the OxyXmas theme and show the Chromium icon sporting a jolly Santa hat.

How does my desktop look for the season? Here’s a clean shot:

And here’s a dirty shot:

Thanks to spacepenguin for creating this fun set of icons.

Purry Christmas, everyone!

Updated 9 December: I’m making a number of LOLs from ICHC’s Advent Kitteh calendar so I decided to post all of them on this page as well as adding them to the LOLs page Nanci made for me. I’m also making this post “sticky” to make it easier to find as I write other new posts. To keep it from making the blog’s home page too long I’m also including a jump. Come back daily to see the new LOLs I create between now and Chrismukkuh. – Peng

I just made a new LOL but instead of just putting it on my LOL page I wanted to share it as our Chrismukkuh wish from Nanci and I.

Glad I’m done making toys (5 December)

As always, please vote for my LOLs on I Can Has Cheezburger to help them get on the main page of the site. Check out the rest of the LOLs I created from ICHC’s Advent Kitteh calendar after the jump. The newest one will always get put at the top after the jump. Updated 21 December: We’re going to change the jump point to show the latest LOL before the jump to make it easier to find the newest one.

Updated 23 December: I realized I had completely missed the first four days of ICHC’s 2001 Advent Kitteh Calendar. I’ve created LOLs for each of those four days, and you can find the after the jump. I’ve also added the date each picture came up on ICHC’s Advent Kitteh Calendar. You’ll find some days missing, and that’s because I can’t think of a good caption for the pictures. If I come up with something I’ll add the LOLs I create to this page.

Advent LOL added 25 December 2011
Something tells me this sleigh isn’t getting off the ground

More Advent Kittehs after the jump.

[HOWTO] Fixing Chromium on Linux Mint Debian Edition with KDE SC 4.7.2

Yesterday I wrote about updating to KDE SC 4.7.2 and the fact that Chromium broke thanks to a long known issue in Debian testing repos. My original fix was to install Google Chrome, but that wasn’t that great of a fix because I really want to run Chromium, not Chrome. Although running Chrome seems to fix the problem of missing the first character of Facebook status updates, which is a royal PITA. Today wayne128 shared a fix he uses to get past the “Aw snap!” messages.

NOTE: Please note that this fix uses an unusual source for getting the updated Chromium packages. If you add this source to your sources.list please disable it once you get Chromium installed to prevent other breakages.

The fix is to use a repository for aptosid. Before we add the repo let’s make a backup of your sources.list.

kdesudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup

Now open sources.list by running this command in your terminal

sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

Here’s the repo to add at the bottom of the list:

deb http://oscar.aptosid.com/debian/ sid main fix.main
#deb-src http://oscar.aptosid.com/debian/ sid main fix.main

You can leave the source code entry commented out or you can enable it by removing the “#” at the start of the line. Save and close the file and let’s get your package list updated.

sudo apt-get update

Let’s check to make sure your system can see the right version by running apt-cache policy chromium in your terminal. No sudo is needed for this command. You can ignore the version listed for Installed but the Candidate version should match this

~$ apt-cache policy chromium
chromium:
Installed: 15.0.874.106~r107270-1+c0.aptosid.1
Candidate: 15.0.874.106~r107270-1+c0.aptosid.1
Version table:
*** 15.0.874.106~r107270-1+c0.aptosid.1 0
500 http://oscar.aptosid.com/debian/ sid/fix.main amd64 Packages
500 ftp://ftp.spline.de/pub/aptosid/debian/ sid/fix.main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
15.0.874.106~r107270-1 0
500 http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
14.0.835.202~r103287-1 0
500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing/main amd64 Packages
~$

If the candidate version matches you’re ready to take the next step. If you already have Chromium (the browser) installed run sudo apt-get upgrade and make sure chromium is available to be upgraded.  Otherwise run sudo pat-get install chromium in your terminal. Either way you get Chromium 15.0.874.106~r107270-1+c0.aptosid.1 you can now launch it and be able to use the browser instead of being greeted with “Aw snap!” on every tab you open.

You’re almost done with the task. Before you go back to your web surfing open sources.list again and comment the lines you’ve added out by putting “#” at the start of each line. That way you won’t have to worry about getting prompted about updates you don’t need.  When Chromium gets fixed in Debian it should make the aptosid repos unnecessary, and if Debian updates it and you end up with the error messages again it will be an easy process of uncommenting the lines, getting aptosid’s newest packages and commenting them out again.

You can see wayne1287′s post itself on the Linux Mint Forums.

On a side note, you’ll see a number of packages being held back, and I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m not sure why the packages are being held back but I haven’t missed any held back package since I’ve done these updates. (If someone knows why they’re held back please leave it in the comments so we can get the info.) Updating and upgrading in the terminal will keep some packages held back but if you select all the updates in Synaptic they’ll be installed so I wouldn’t update with Synaptic if you’re running KDE SC 4.7.2 on Linux Mint.

[HOWTO] Get KDE SC 4.7.2 on Linux Mint Debian Edition, and a fix to the LMDE Chromium issue

[Updated 5 December to include an additional pair of apps  the broke with the upgrade. - Peng]

I love being able to run KDE on Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), even if it is just KDE 4.6.5. I was able to install it without jumping through any hoops or using any repositories not counted among in the default Linux Mint software repos. Boo had been working on getting Linux Mint 11 KDE ready for release, but before we could get to a release candidate The Powers That Be realized that a ton of work would be needed to get Mint 11 KDE, based on Kubuntu, ready for release, and that rather than fix the problems they’d move Mint KDE to the LMDE base. Before that could start clem, the founder of Linux Mint, had to get LMDE Update Pack 3 released to the user base, and he needed to get Mint 12 out. Unfortunately before Mint 12 was released boo found that he couldn’t continue being the lead maintainer of Mint KDE any longer, so now all the work of getting LMDE KDE ready falls on clem’s plate, along with everything else he has to do.

But back in August I noticed a thread on the Linux Mint Forums called “KDE SC 4.7.2 enters Debian (only amd64).” Since Kathryn runs the amd64 version LMDE I was eager to get KDE 4.7.2, and all I needed to do first was get some other work out of the way and have some time to make sure the updates I would get wouldn’t break my system. This is especially important since the first step is to upgrade to the Debian Testing repos rather than using the Linux Mint Incoming repos and I was already seeing posts in a thread about broken apps in Testing upgrades. This wasn’t that big of a problem to me because I’ve run nightly and testing builds of software before and knew how to be careful. But there was a huge issue in the fact that I couldn’t find the information I needed to switch to the testing repos, the first step in getting ready to get KDE 4.7.2. Luckily GeneC gave me the information I was looking for, and since it was so hard to find I’m going to list the steps you need if you want to get KDE 4.7.2, or even just get packages from Debian Testing rather than even LMDE incoming.

Important: Please read the entire post and make sure you understand what you’ll be doing and have backed up your system before performing any of the steps I lay out. I’d hate to get you partway to the new KDE and have you stuck with something you don’t understand. Also, the KDE 4.7.2 update is a semi-official Debian-kde build so you’ll be using different repositories to get it. All the information on this release of KDE 4.7.2 is available on the qt-kde Debian site.

Disclaimer: These steps are not to be taken lightly. There is a very good chance that you may get an upgrade that breaks your system, leaving you to hunt for a fix (if there is one) or even having to reinstall LMDE all over again. If you’re not not comfortable with the risk of completely wrecking your computer don’t perform these steps. And even if you are willing to take that very real risk, check the latest posts in this thread on the Linux Mint Forums to see what problems are cropping up lately. Even if the coast looks clear think long and hard about taking these steps on the computer you use on a daily basis. And of course don’t forget the most important step: Back up your system before doing any of this.

You’re still here? You must be a glutton for punishment, and I’m not even going to make too many puns. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) After you’ve backed up your system (I’m not kidding about that step), start by making sure your system is up to date by running this in your terminal:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

When you have made sure your system is up to date you need to back up your sources.list file before you start changing anything there. An easy way to backup the file is by running this command in a terminal

kdesudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup

Now open sources.list by running this command in your terminal

sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

Your current sources.list should contain entries very close to this:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming testing main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming/security testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming/multimedia testing main non-free

Comment out those lines, except for the very first line, by putting “#” as the very first character in each line (except the one for packages.linuxmint.com). Before you can snag the new KDE 4.7.2 packages you need to upgrade your system to use the Linux Mint Sid (testing) repos. First let’s get you updated to the Linux Mint Incoming repos. To do that add these lines at the bottom of your sources.list.

deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming testing main contrib non-free

Save the file and update your package list and software again, and let’s apply the first batch of updates if you don’t have them already. Run this command in your terminal

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The upgrade could take some time, so have some coffee or a soda, and a smoke if you are part of the wonderful group of folks on the planet that smoke. Don’t go too far though because the process will have some questions about the upgrades for you to answer. When it’s done you will probably need to apply more updates after rebooting your system. Why reboot your system? You may be getting updates that can only be applied with a system reboot, the only kind of updates and installs in Linux that require a reboot, unlike Windows’ insistence on reboots after installing anything. You may also have other updates waiting for you after the reboot, and apply them with

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Make sure you’re happy with your system after the updates, and don’t apply any more updates from this post until you’re happy with how your system is operating. Did something break already? It’s time to hunt down what got broken and how to fix it. Once you are completely up to date with incoming and happy with your system you need to update your system to Mint Sid (unstable testing). Here’s where you can really hose your system, so don’t do the steps below unless you’re willing to risk making your system completely unusable. Ready to take the risk? Comment out the lines for the Testing repo and add these lines at the bottom of your sources.list

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import backport
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org sid main non-free
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

Update and upgrade again, and again this could take some time and it could have some questions for you to answer again. Reboot your system after it’s done because once again you’ve got updates that can’t be applied and used until you reboot your system. Again, make sure you’re happy with how your system operates, and if you’re not bookmark this page and come back to it after you’ve resolved the problems you’ve discovered.

/me fires up the David Wax Museum and enjoys their tunes while you take care of your new issues

Welcome back. Everything copacetic now? Cool. Let’s get you KDE 4.7.2. Backup your sources list again, and if you’ve done other things since you got Sid installed backup your system again, just to be on the safe side. Like I said at the top of the post, this update isn’t coming from the standard Debian repos, so you’ll need to add the appropriate repos to your sources.list file. Open the file and see if you have the following lines, and if so remove them.

deb http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main
deb-src http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main

deb http://qt-kde2.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main
deb-src http://qt-kde2.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main

Update your system again with

sudo apt-get update

and let’s tell your system that the packages from those repos are trusted. Run this line in your terminal

sudo apt-get install pkg-kde-archive-keyring

Once it’s installed update your package list and make sure your system is updated one more time with

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Everything green? Let’s get you upgraded to KDE 4.7.2. This update is different from most upgrades you run, including dist-upgrades. This time you want to run

sudo apt-get -t experimental-snapshots dist-upgrade

This upgrade could be the longest of the bunch, and you’ll definitely need to stay close by to answer some questions the upgrade process will ask you. When it’s all done go ahead and do one more reboot to apply the last set of upgrades. When you log back in your desktop may not look all that different, but checking About KDE in System Settings will have a new version number for you to see. Here are a pair of screenshots of my system after the upgrade.

Clean

Dirty

Updated 5 December: It turns out two other apps died with this upgrade. Electric Sheep broke because I had to reinstall xscreensaver. The wallpaper finder and changer app Webilder also broke, but this is due to the fact that python-appindicator is not available in my current repos. Unfortunately I don’t see a way to fix it

What the hell happened to my Chromium???

There’s one big casualty in the upgrade process to KDE 4.7.2, and that’s the fact that the Chromium browser is borked. Every time you launch chromium-browser all your pages show the “Snap!” error, even the preferences page. It’s a known issue and to fix it you’ll have to install Google Chrome instead. The Google Linux repos are borked so you’ll have to install the it manually. Go to the Google Chrome website and download the package. Open the directory you downloaded it into and run this command in Terminal

sudo dpkg-i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

You can also install the package from Dolphin by double-clicking it, but if it opens in Ark you need to install a package.

sudo apt-get install gdebi-kde

That package will let you install packages with a graphical installer. Many Linux hate using graphical package installers like this, but it’s a matter of personal preference. I love being able to use Gdebi and had to do some searching to find it when I installed KDE on top of LMDE.

There’s one more thing to to before you launch Chrome for the first time. You’ll want to import your Chromium settings into Chrome, but there’s no settings import option that I was able to find. Luckily it’s easy to do. Just copy everything from ~/.config/chromium/ into ~/.config/google-chrome and all of your settings from Chromium will be available in Chrome, including your passwords, cookies, extensions and search engine settings.