Use with flatpak

[tobfromme]

This is an odd one. I tried to install Chrome via Flatpak ( https://flathub.org/apps/com.google.Chrome ).

You'll notice the command to execute it is flatpak run com.google.Chrome. However, bing-rewards doesn't like this:

[user@host]$ bing-rewards -c 2
Doing 2 desktop searches
Unexpected error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'flatpak run com.google.Chrome'
ERROR: Chrome could not be found on system PATH
Make sure it is installed and added to PATH,or use the --exe flag to give an absolute path

I tried putting the flatpak command in a script, but it errors differently:

[user@host]$ bing-rewards -c 2
Doing 2 desktop searches
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/bing-rewards", line 8, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/bing_rewards/__init__.py", line 331, in main
    desktop()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/bing_rewards/__init__.py", line 310, in desktop
    search(
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/bing_rewards/__init__.py", line 233, in search
    chrome = subprocess.Popen(
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py", line 971, in __init__
    self._execute_child(args, executable, preexec_fn, close_fds,
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py", line 1847, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception_type(errno_num, err_msg, err_filename)
OSError: [Errno 8] Exec format error: '/home/user/runchrome'

Any idea what "Exec format error" may mean? It would help me get around this.

[tobfromme]

sigh You know, this happened before. I troubleshoot for a long time, come up short, so I open an issue, then suddenly I find an answer.

To solve, make the script to run the flatpak look like this:

#!/bin/sh
flatpak run com.google.Chrome

[jack-mil]

Ok, I am glad you found a fix. This issue is due to the way the python process launches a new chrome instance. It is expecting to launch an executable called "chrome" or similar directly. It expects a path to a file on the system. When run a Flatpak app, you actually are launching the flatpak program and passing command line parameters 'run' and 'com.google.Chrome'. I don't use flatpak myself, but I am assuming that additional arguments to the flatpak command are passed to the running process. You may need to format your script like flatpack run com.google.Chrome -- $@ or similar depending on how flatpak handles arguments sent to the launched process. This will be necessary to launch chrome with the --user-agent flag that the script uses to set a mobile user agent.