Google's Chrome Browser on Linux · Jun 13, 09:39 AM
There’s only been one true browser on Linux for as long as I can remember, and that is Firefox. It’s always been a few steps ahead of the competition. Google’s Chrome browser could be a worthy rival so I was excited to find that there was a very early non-consumer-ready preview available for testing.
The Google browser was launched in a flurry of publicity but only for the Windows platform. I lost interest. Then I saw this post on the Chromium Blog saying that very early don’t-expect-too-much builds were available for testing. The dire warnings only made me more likely to hit the release page to download the thing.
My overall impression is: Wow! The new browser feels quite a bit faster than Firefox. It might be an unfair comparison because FF has a lot of plugins and history, cookies, passwords etc. Even so it feels like Chrome has a streamlined core covered with scant features, whereas Firefox has a more sluggish core with lots of nice features on top. If Chrome can pad out with the missing user friendliness, Firefox will become a fallback option.
So, here are some notes on getting Chrome to run on Fedora linux, either F10 or F11.
I use Fedora and hoped the browser could be made to work in F10 even though the release was actually for a Debian based system. I think there are some automated tools to convert packages from one Linux platform to another but luckily the package formats are fairly open and it’s a relatively easy task to extract the binaries.
I downloaded the .deb package, saving it to my desktop. A double click opened it as an archive and I could see the three parts of the debian package format – the metadata in a control.tar.gz file and the installable stuff in data.tar.gz. I saved out the data.tar.gz to the desktop.
A double click on the data.tar.gz and I was able to explore the contents to make sure there would be nothing that could conflict with the stuff already installed – there was just a cron entry to go into /etc, some files under /opt and a single binary to go into /usr/bin. Nothing that would overwrite existing files.
I su to root and, in the root directory, unpacked the data.tar.gz file. Only ever do this if you are confident it won’t overwrite something important! Then as a normal user I tried running google-chrome. I expected there would be some problems and there were.
A number of libraries were not found and a bit of searching revealed that the closest I could get to the required libraries were already installed on my system, but the filenames were different. In these cases the easiest fix is to make a soft link from the existing files with the name that google-chrome expects them to have: so as root I did:
ln -s /lib/libnspr4.so /lib/libnspr4.so.0d
ln -s /lib/libnss3.so /lib/libnss3.so.1d
ln -s /lib/libnssutil3.so /lib/libnssutil3.so.1d
ln -s /lib/libsmime3.so /lib/libsmime3.so.1d
ln -s /lib/libssl3.so /lib/libssl3.so.1d
ln -s /lib/libplds4.so /lib/libplds4.so.0d
ln -s /lib/libplc4.so /lib/libplc4.so.0d
After that Google Chrome just worked. Even better, I upgraded to the newly released Fedora 11 which left me with a briefly unworking Firefox (until a kind irc volunteer told me to remove libflashsupport). At that time the only working browser I had was Chrome, and it worked just fine too.
If you try the above it might work for a Fedora 10 or 11 system. If you get it working and find any bugs please report them and help to further the development of what looks like a worthy rival to Firefox.
hi, nice tip :) thanks for sharing … I upgraded to fedora 11 yesterday .. so, this weekend, if I get time, I will try this also
— dinu Jun 13, 10:10 AM #
Tom Callaway has native Fedora RPMs here:
http://fedorapeople.org/~spot/chromium/
— Dave Malcolm Jun 16, 06:45 PM #
Excellent page, worked like a charm!
The only thing is the latest .deb has data.tar.lzma inside it, but that can easily be uncompressed after installing the lzma RPM.
— Chris Heath Jul 1, 04:19 AM #
There’s a trick with the RPMs from Tom – you can get yum to update them by adding a repo like this:
/etc/yum.repos.d/chromium.repo:
[chromium]
name=Spot Chromium Browser
baseurl=http://fedorapeople.org/~spot/chromium/F12/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
Just create that and chromium should be updated whenever you run yum update
— Cam Sep 26, 08:18 AM #
I was having some problems with the builds from ‘Spot’ and looked into it. The builds were a little old and I was hitting a bug in some Facebook pages. It turns out the Spot builds were more of an exercise in clean packaging than a finished product. While I appreciate the skill and effort put into them they are ultimately neither a good way for end users to see Chrome, nor a good way for testers to contribute to Google’s developers. So I was glad to find the Google repos after reading Tom’s LiveJournal: Tom ‘Spot’ Callaway on Chromium: Why it isn’t in Fedora yet as a proper package For the Google repos, see here: Google Linux Software Repositories
Now I’ve got the Google unstable build and it looks more usable than Tom’s build, and because it’s closer to the Google coders it should be more helpful if I feed back bugs.
Finally, kudos to Tom for his packaging feat, I’d expect no less from the Fedora engineering manager ;-)
— Cam Dec 8, 10:07 PM #