Google Chromium Web Browser

I was trolling the Fedora forums when I saw a post by mariuszs on “Google Chrome in FC11“. A bit of excitement rushed through my body and I checked it out. Sure enough it lead me to the http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/ site and it left me very confused. I didn’t know what I was looking at.  Lucky for me it was explained in the thread how easy it was to add this test repository for me to eventually do a:

# yum install chromium

So; i’m reposting the instructions to give it more traction.

Add the Chromium Test Repository

I’ve been using RPMs to add repositories to my system. I didn’t know what actually went behind adding a repo.  It’s very easy: open a text editor, add in some code, save it and you’re finished.

gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/chromium.repo

Now add the following content:

[chromium]
name=Chromium Test Packages
baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F$releasever/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Save the file. It’ll create the “chromium.repo” in the “/etc/yum.repos.d” folder. Wow that was enlightening.

Install Chromium

Just run the yum install command and you’re good to go. The coolest part is, since it’s a repository, when the developer udpates it, you’ll get updated too.

# yum install chromium

Flash Support

mariuszs continues the thread by telling us about how to get Flash working in this version of Chromium on an x86_64 system. The guy’s a saint! There are three packages (flash-plugin, libcanberra-gtk2, and PackageKit-gtk), if you don’t already have them installed.

# yum install flash-plugin-10.0.22.87-release.i386
libcanberra-gtk2-0.12-1.fc11.i586
PackageKit-gtk-module-0.4.8-1.fc11.i586

Then link the “libflashplayer.so” file to the Chromium plugins folder, just like Firefox:

cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so

When you’re ready to finally jump right into Chromium, run this command: “chromium-browser”.  To enable Flash support append it with “–enable-plugins”. That option will activate Flash and cause other plugins (if you have any) to load with the browser. So; in the end, your final command will be

$ chromium-browser --enable-plugins

Thanks mariuszs for the detailed post and Tom “spot” Callaway for the repo and Chromium build. You guys are my heroium!


This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 2:01 am and is filed under Linuxapade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.