A Linux users' guide to Google Chrome

By David M Williams
Thursday, 04 September 2008 04:38

Opinion and Analysis

Google's Chrome web browser is upon us, with performance already hitting legendary status. Yet, it is presently available only for use on Microsoft Windows systems? What then for us, the Linux user? Here's how to begin poking around and see what the future looks like.

Linux is steeped in a rich history of hacking – not necessarily the nefarious criminal type, but “hacking” in the sense of curious minds keen to find out how things work or, if it doesn’t work, to make it do so!

Now, it makes sense Google have only released Chrome for one platform at this time. Obviously, they’re keen to gain traction and explain the Chrome story and have put out a usable beta as soon as they were able. Sure, they could have waited until MacOS and Linux ports were complete. They could also have waited until they were out of beta stage in general. Heck, they could even have held off until they were up to version 2.0 and had stamped out all the initial bugs. So, let’s not lament the lack of a Linux build at this time given the practical expediency that Google have employed to make at least something accessible.

However, it also stands to reason there’s many a Linux user who won’t be content with just being told there’s no Chrome for them; as sure as day and night follow each other there are brains ticking over around the world trying to make a usable Linux Chrome build with what’s available now.

It occurred to me there were at least three possible options. We could check out the Linux source code and see what it does so far; who knows, maybe there is a Chrome alpha which works and gives a hint. Or, we could download the Windows source code and try building from it. After all, Google live in a world of multiple operating systems and browsers; no doubt their developers are switched on and have used code which is as standard and cross-platform as possible. Failing these, we could simply try running the released Chrome beta for Windows under WINE.

Today, I’ll show you how to obtain and build the Linux source. A heads up: you won’t be Chroming after this, Google haven’t finished porting it to Linux and I’m certainly not smarter than the Google engineers and have no magic fix. But, I do think it is interesting to at least start making efforts so when a Linux build is ready you have an advantage in already having gone through the exercise. Plus, there are some interesting elements in the source code which we can look at now, that’s definitely something we can do already.

First, you must make sure you have the necessary development tools. You will need the following tools, with at least the version number indicated: subversion 1.4, pkg-config 0.20, Python 2.4, Perl 5.0, gcc/g++ 4.2, bison 2.3, flex 2.5.34, gperf 3.0.3, libnss3-dev 3.12.

Happily, there’s no real effort in meeting this requirement. Under Ubuntu you can retrieve all these with one command:
sudo apt-get install subversion pkg-config python perl g++ bison flex gperf libnss3-dev

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