Google stopped supporting Google Chrome on 32-bit Linux in March 2016, which ended up users using Linux 32-bit distribution in a fix. Ubuntu/Debian users are getting an error while using the Chromium browser which goes like this:

‘Failed to fetch http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/dists/stable/Release
Unable to find expected entry ‘main/binary-i386/Packages’ in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)
Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.’

What can you do?

Linux 32-bit users

Uninstall Chrome as you will receive no more security updates or fixes. Chromium will be updated by your Linux distribution, and not by Google.

Linux 64-bit users

Set the repository specifically for 64-bit by adding “[arch=amd64]” after “deb” in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list. It should finally look like deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
You had to keep doing this after every Google Chrome update until Google fixed this in version 49.0.2623.87. Check this out for the update.

Chrome Beta users

If you’re running the beta of Chrome, you need to change the list file as such:
sudo sed -i -e ‘s/deb http/deb [arch=amd64] http/’ “/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome-beta.list”

Chrome Unstable

For Chrome Unstable, you can add
sudo sed -i ‘s/deb http/deb [arch=amd64] http/’ “/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome-unstable.list”

The second line will be:
sudo sed -i -e ‘s/deb http/deb [arch=amd64] http/’ “/opt/google/chrome-unstable/cron/google-chrome-unstable”
This helps you make the change persistent.

Linux Mint 17 users

For Mint users, the text file gets reset by the Update Manager. To fix the issue, you will update it in Update Manager itself.

Change:
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list
to:
deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
Then:
sudo gedit /opt/google/chrome/cron/google-chrome
Change Lines# 24 & 25 to:
REPOCONFIG=”deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main”
SSLREPOCONFIG=”deb [arch=amd64] https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main”
Update either with sudo apt-get update && upgrade or with Update manager “refresh”
This should ideally fix the error. If you have more information on this, let us know in comments.