What exactly are you doing (list each step in turn) and where do you see the error message? Can you provide an screenshot of your screen when you see the error message?

Try this:

Open a terminal and issue the following to download into your /tmp directory.

wget -P /tmp http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1151/opera_11.51.1087_$(uname -m | sed 's,i[4-6]86,i386,').deb

Use the following to confirm the download was entirely successful. It should echo back the name of the package downloaded followed by ": OK". If it doesn't say OK, the file did not download correctly.

wget -qO- http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/info/md5sum.txt | grep opera_11.51.1087_$(uname -m | sed 's,i[4-6]86,i386,').deb | sed "s,\./.*/,/tmp/," | md5sum -c

Start installation with the following.

sudo dpkg -i /tmp/opera_11.51.1087_*.deb

If you see errors at any stage reply with the exact text

Originally posted by Fizyk:

why to go to all these problems if you get opera's deb downloaded

Because there is no issue installing the Opera deb with the latest software center so I can only imagine you have an incomplete download.

I cannot reproduce any such issue. If you can install with dpkg then it shows the issue is some problem with software center your end. If you want to confirm that the opera package is indeed valid and has no issues, run lintian against it.

Originally posted by Fizyk:

I checked and after few tries I got this

That looks fine. Those are expected, hence overridden.

I just tried again now with an Ubuntu "Oneiric Ocelot" 11.10 LiveCD (since I don't run Ubuntu at home) and I was able to install without issue



It was exceptionally time consuming but then the Software Centre always is.

P.S. If you are comfortable using dpkg and/or apt on the command line I would stick with it personally.

Perhaps some breakage to Software Centre after a recent update, preventing installation of locally sourced packages? Just a guess.

As I said before, If it can be installed with dpkg and lintian isn't complaining, then the deb is fine.

Try installing some other deb that isn't available within the Ubuntu repositories and see if that works.

@shinoge: Try Fizyk's suggestion. Open a terminal and issue:

sudo dpkg -i /home/nuanda/Downloads/opera_11.51.1087_amd64.deb

P.S. I'll update my Ubuntu 11.10 install tomorrow and purge Opera, then see if I can replicate installing via the Software Centre. I'm fairly sure it is their problem though. In the mean time anyone having this problem can just use dpkg.

Those who are having the problem, could you run the following to find out the exact version number of your software centre:

dpkg -l software-center

The version on the LiveCD is 5.0.1.4. I'd like to know if you have a more recent version.

Ok, I think I have it worked out. I'll post back with more information when I have done just a little more testing. Thanks to all of you who have responded. Much appreciated!!

Ok, testing finished, here is a summary of the issue.

A .deb package is actually just an ar archive that contains three files:

• debian-binary: A text file that contains the deb format version number ("2.0" these days).
• control.tar.gz: This contains several other text files that store Meta package information and install scripts
• data.tar: This contains the file system layout, optionally compressed with GZip, BZip2, LZMA or xz.

The problem with our packages (as far as Software Centre is concerned) is that our data.tar is LZMA compressed. We selected this compression method as it is just as small as xz compression but has been supported by distros for longer than xz. Hence it allows us to have small packages that will install on a wide range of Debian based distros.

However, in a clean default desktop installation of Ubuntu "Oneiric Ocelot" 11.10 the LZMA compression package is not installed. Because of this Software Centre cannot inspect its contents, explaining the "cannot be opened" error message.

So how is it opened from a Ubuntu "Oneiric Ocelot" 11.10 LiveCD or older Ubuntu? They both provide /usr/bin/lzma.

And what about dpkg and apt? They work because they use xz to open it since the xz compression format is actually a continuation of the LZMA compression format. In fact if you setup a /usr/bin/lzma as a symlink pointing to /usr/bin/xz even Software Centre can open the Opera packages. So the bug is with Software Centre because unlike the lower level command line utilities it doesn't realise that it doesn't need the lzma executable, xz will do just fine!

There is a work around for us. We could change the internal compression format within our Debian files. Our choices are GZip, BZip2 or XZ. xz compression would keep the packages at the same small size but would prevent installation of Opera on older Debian based repositories and hence is not really feasible for us right now. So in all likelihood it seems we will have have to use either GZip or BZip2, which will bump the Opera packages size by a few Mbs.

The proper fix however must come from Ubuntu/Canonical. They need to update Software Centre so that if an LZMA compressed Debian package is found and lzma is not available xz should be used to read the archive.

It seems that Google Chrome have exactly the same issue:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/868188

Originally posted by Fizyk:

Great!
I've posted link in relevant bug reports on launchpad

Thanks. I just did the same thing!

After some testing I have updated the Opera 12.00 Alpha debs to use bzip2 compression rather than lzma. They should now install with the Software Centre provided by Ubuntu "Oneiric Ocelot" 11.10.

If someone else would like to test as well and report back I would appreciate it. They are found here:

http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/alpha_12.00-1105/

Here are copies of the Opera stable version 11.51, re-packaged using bzip2 compression. Again confirmation that these files install successfully would be appreciated:

32-Bit Opera 11.51 for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)
64-Bit Opera 11.51 for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

Originally posted by maxboy01:

thank you

Is that a confirmation that installation worked?

Remember I asked:

Originally posted by ruario:

confirmation that these files install successfully would be appreciated

Great, I'll see about getting the official builds updated.

Ok, Opera 11.52 is released. It uses bzip2 compression for now to work around the issue and also includes a fix for a recent security issue. Because of the security aspect it is recommended that everyone update.

ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1152/