Downtown Doug Brown » I fixed a 6-year-old .deb installation bug in Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu

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2024-07-10 03:30:05

Sometime back in 2018, I tried out a fresh install of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 on one of my computers and noticed a strange problem when I attempted to install Google Chrome. I clicked the little Firefox icon in the top panel:

When I clicked Install Package, the installer window just disappeared. I sat around for a moment thinking maybe it was busy doing something in the background, but nothing ever happened. What I expected to see was a dialog asking me for my password so that the installation could continue with superuser privileges. That was how it worked on 16.04.

To be honest, at the time I just ignored this issue. I didn’t want to deal with it. I went off to the trusty Linux terminal and installed Chrome that way instead:

I got Chrome up and running and put its icon in place of Firefox’s in my panel. Both browsers are great, by the way — I just prefer Chrome.

I thought nothing of it and continued playing around in my new Linux install. A few days later I downloaded another .deb file in Chrome and attempted to install it. The exact same thing happened! The installer went away when I clicked the Install Package button. So the problem wasn’t Firefox-specific. It also affected Chrome, and was likely completely agnostic to my browser choice.