Undo "apt-get purge" for google chrome

Question

I had some sort of browser-junk malware in my google chrome installation, so I wanted to completely destroy that installation. I followed the instructions here:

How do I completely uninstall Google Chrome and Chromium?

So I used sudo apt-get purge google-chrome-stable (and deleted ~/.config/google-chrome). Now I want to reinstall, so I tried sudo apt-get install google-chrome stable, and it spit out this result:

$ sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package google-chrome-stable

It seems like (How to undo an improper purge?) suggests that should work, and sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop (Undo apt-get remove --purge) seems like overkill. Is there something simple I can do to reinstall this package?

Chrome is not in the default repos, when you uninstalled it, did it take out the Chrome repo too? Download it from Google and install the .deb. — Mark Kirby, Aug 25 '16 at 17:51
Possible duplicate of How do I do a Chrome offline installation? — Anwar, Aug 25 '16 at 18:54
Chrome adds its own PPA when you install the DEB, IIRC. If you purge it, it'll remove that PPA. You need to reinstall from a DEB. — TheWanderer, Aug 25 '16 at 18:58
Thank you for the helpful comments! I edited the question because it turns out it was quite specific to google chrome, and I compiled these comments into an answer. — John Haberstroh, Aug 26 '16 at 18:59

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

Google chrome is not a default Ubuntu repository. Because of this, "apt-get purge" discarded the PPA (which was added automatically by google's .deb installer) from the repositories being managed by apt-get, and there is no way to simply apt-get install the repository again without re-adding the PPA.

The solution is to reinstall chrome from the .deb file, as described here: How do I do a Chrome offline installation?

Undo "apt-get purge" for google chrome

1 Answers1