Software updater snuck in a package that is unwanted

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2017-10-17 at 11:07 -0700, John R. Sowden wrote:
> I cannot tell.  I went to Syn Pkg Mrg and searched for "chrom", to 
> include Chromium, and got a couple dozen packages.  None of them are 
> installed.  Then I ran the catfish file finder and found 143
> results.  
> Some were for "chroma", etc. 45 were from:
> /lib/modules/3.13.0-79-
> generic/kernel/drivers/platform/chrome/chromeos_laptop.ko

It's not clear what you want to do.  What do you mean by "you can't
keep it off your computer"?  What exactly is "it" in this sentence?  In
what way does it stay on your computer (in other words, what happens
that concerns you)?

Unfortunately I don't use graphical tools like Synaptic for package
management; I only use the commands at the shell command line.  So I'm
not sure how to advise you about "Syn Pkg Mrg" (I assume this means
Synaptic Package Manager).

Chrome is a proprietary browser shipped by Google.  It's not available
in any standard Ubuntu repository, you have to add a special, different
repository to get it.  If you want to install this, you should look
here: https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/desktop/index.html

Chromium is an open source version of the Chrome browser.  It doesn't
support all the capabilities of Chrome.  This IS available in the
standard Ubuntu repositories.  You can install this with something
like:

  $ sudo apt install chromium-browser

If you want to see what packages are available containing the name
"chrome" you can use the venerable "dpkg" command:

  $ dpkg -l '*chrome*'

The packages that start with "ii" are installed.  The packages that
start with "un" are not installed.

If you want to see which packages are available containing the name
"chromium" you can use:

  $ dpkg -l '*chromium*'

To be clear, not every file containing the string "chrome" (or variants
of that string) have anything to do with the Google Chrome browser. 
You can't just search for all files with that name and assume that
their presence means Chrome is installed on your system.



> On 10/17/2017 09:54 AM, Colin Law wrote:
> > On 17 October 2017 at 17:09, John R. Sowden <jsowden at americansentry
> > .net> wrote:
> > > I have had a similar issue with Chrome, the browser written by a
> > > company who collects personal information.  This 'open source'
> > > program has part that is 'not open source'.  I cannot keep it off
> > > my computer.  Whenever I accept updates from Ubuntu (16.04),
> > > there is lots of 'chrome' afterwards.
> > 
> > Can you tell us the name of one of the offending packages please,
> > and also what you see for apt-cache policy the-package-name