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A couple of weeks ago, I installed Slackware64-current on my laptop.
I was having difficulty with the audio being out of sync when playing Flash videos through Firefox. So I did some research into it and learned a lot about what has been going on with Flash in the last few years. Long story short: I decided to try Google Chrome.
So, I followed the instructions in extra/google-chrome to get it installed... but somewhere along the line, I was distracted by one of my kids and so I forgot to install the special 'libpam' package which is in that directory.
... But even without it, Google Chrome has been working fine so far.
What am I risking by not having the libpam package installed? Do I really need to install it?
libpam provides access interface to the PAM system. PAM is not part of a standard Slackware install, you'd need to install it yourself. As you are likely no using PAM you should be fine without libpam. I don't use Google-Chrome so not sure what it wants to use PAM for so there may be n obscure problem at some point.
The point is that Pat actually provides that google-chrome-pam-solibs package in /extra to install alongside Chrome, with the following statement in the README:
Quote:
Originally Posted by volkerdi
Finally, please note that Google Chrome requires the PAM library libpam.so.0. Installing the google-chrome-pam-solibs package in this directory will allow these newer versions of Chrome to run without having to actually switch the system to using PAM.
However, like rkelsen I also accidentally noticed that Chrome appears to run without PAM (I was making Stable, Beta and Dev packages that install alongside each other [for some comparative testing] but forgot to place the pam-solibs into each of their install directories). Anyway, once I realised that Chrome was running without PAM, I then ran ldd against all the binaries in the Chrome directory (chrome, nacl_irt_x86_64.nexe, nacl_irt_x86_32.nexe, nacl_helper_bootstrap, nacl_helper, libwidevinecdmadapter.s, libwidevinecdm.so, libppGoogleNaClPluginChrome.so, libpdf.so libffmpegsumo.so and PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so) and none of them appear to use PAM, i.e.:
The above was with google-chrome-stable-26.0.1410.63 but I see pretty much the same result with google-chrome-beta-27.0.1453.81 and google-chrome-unstable-28.0.1500.3.
P.S. It is not a problem that nacl_irt_x86_64.nexe, nacl_irt_x86_32.nexe and nacl_helper_bootstrap state "not a dynamic executable" because they are statically linked binaries.
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