Unable to install Brave on Fedora Silverblue

I am running a Linux desktop using the Fedora Silverblue distro. Fedora Silverblue is based on Fedora Workstation, but takes a new and more modern approach to package distribution. Because of this, the provided installation instructions for Fedora don’t work - the dnf command is unavailable.

The recommended way to install applications on Fedora Silverblue is via modern Flatpaks. This is quick and easy for most apps. Unfortunately, Brave is not available as a Flatpak: issue #1000.

In the meantime, I attempted to install Brave through rpm-ostree. Google Chrome can be installed in this way, so I figured it should be possible with Brave as well. There are instructions on installing Chrome on Silverblue here. I attempted to adapt these instructions for Brave, by adding a repo file /etc/yum.repos.d/brave-browser.repo containing:

[brave-browser]
name=brave-browser
baseurl=https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/x86_64
skip_if_unavailable=True
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/brave-core.asc

After rebooting, I then run rpm-ostree install brave-browser to attempt to install the brave-browser package from this repository. Unfortunately, this fails with an error:

Checking out tree 91a9f55… done Enabled rpm-md repositories: fedora updates brave-browser rpm-md repo ‘fedora’ (cached); generated: 2019-10-23T22:52:47Z rpm-md repo ‘updates’ (cached); generated: 2020-01-13T01:56:31Z rpm-md repo ‘brave-browser’ (cached); generated: 2020-01-09T02:09:13Z Importing rpm-md… done Resolving dependencies… done Will download: 7 packages (77.1 MB) Downloading from ‘updates’… done Downloading from ‘brave-browser’… done Downloading from ‘fedora’… done Importing packages… done Checking out packages… done Running pre scripts… done Running post scripts… done error: Running %post for brave-keyring: Executing bwrap(/bin/sh): Child process stopped by signal 0; run journalctl -t 'rpm-ostree(brave-keyring.post)' for more information

rpm-ostree(brave-keyring.post)[2768]: Redirecting to /bin/systemctl start atd.service rpm-ostree(brave-keyring.post)[2768]: rpm-ostree-systemctl: Ignored non-preset command: start atd.service

As far as I can tell, this is a result of rpm-ostree ignoring any systemctl operations that don’t use the preset arg. Since the Brave installer attempts to run start atd.service for whatever reason, installation fails.

And so I am at a loss. I have not been able to install Brave. While I loved using it on Windows, I am now back on Firefox for Linux.

I’m sure I read somewhere that we should open an issue if we’re unable to install Brave on our distro - but I can no longer find that instruction, so it’s possible I imagined it. My apologies if this is not considered a suitable issue.

[JayDoubleu]

Got it working by editing the brave-keyring rpm and removing %postcript lines which are causing the problem. I’m not sure if brave-browser depends on specific version of keyring so this might have to be repeated when they bump their keyring version. After installing brave-keyring manually, installation of brave-browser from repo works as expected.

• Create Brave.repo file

cat << EOF | sudo tee -a /etc/yum.repos.d/Brave.repo
[brave]
name=Brave Browser repo
baseurl=https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/x86_64/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF

• Install “at” with rpm-ostree and reboot to apply

rpm-ostree install at
systemctl reboot

• toolbox create < only if you haven’t yet created default toolbox
• download brave-keyring rpm into toolbox and edit the rpm

toolbox enter
wget https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/x86_64/brave-keyring-1.8-1.noarch.rpm -O brave-keyring.rpm
sudo dnf -y install rpmrebuild
rpmrebuild -e -p brave-keyring.rpm

• it should open a text editor, at the bottom of the file, remove these two lines:

service atd start
echo "sh /etc/cron.daily/brave-key-updater" | at now + 2 minute > /dev/null 2>&1

• save and exit editor :wq Do you want to continue ? (y/N) y

• It should give you the path to edited rpm file

warning: Could not canonicalize hostname: toolbox
result: /var/home/jaydoubleu/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/brave-keyring-1.8-1.noarch.rpm

• exit the toolbox and install the rpm with rpm-ostree, reboot

rpm-ostree install /var/home/jaydoubleu/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/brave-keyring-1.8-1.noarch.rpm
systemctl reboot

• After reboot install brave browser with rpm-ostree

rpm-ostree install brave-browser

[shibattor]

Any update(s)?