Google Chrome natively running on Gentoo Linux

Written on Jun 05, 2009 // Open Source.

This is just a quick & (very) dirty trick to run Google ChromeChromeChrome on linuxlinuxlinux using a precompiled debian package instead of compiling the enormous source tarball.

Step 1. Download the Deb

Get your browser to Developer Download page for Linux x86 and accept GoogleGoogleGoogle Terms of service.

Step 2. Unpack the unpackable

Open a terminal emulator and cd to your download directory ( mine is Desktop )

cd ~/Desktop
mv google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb /tmp
cd /tmp
ar x google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb
tar xvf data.tar.gz
sudo cp opt/google/chrome /opt/ -r
sudo ln -s /google/chrome/chrome /usr/bin/

Step 3. Link some libs

Chrome requires some libs which I didn’t find in my gentoo portage tree. Probably I could update nss and nspr but I prefer using stable ebuilds so I decided to manually link some missing libs…

ln -s /usr/lib/nss/libnss3.so.12 /usr/lib/libnss3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/nss/libnssutil3.so.12 /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/nss/libsmime3.so.12 /usr/lib/libsmime3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/nss/libssl3.so.12 /usr/lib/libssl3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libplds4.so.7 /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libplc4.so.7 /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libnspr4.so.7 /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d

Step 4. Run it

If you want to simply launch it you just need to run chrome from anywhere.
If you want to create a launcher you can use chrome as command and choose an icon from /opt/chrome/

This is just a pre-release and many features are missing. Anyway I’m quite happy about having the possibility to try out Google Chrome without compiling it (it would be a cpu suicide I believe) and I noticed that it seems incredibly fast on launching. Maybe it’s because not all features have been built in, but it’s impressive in any case!

Here’s a screen I made from my Gentoo Box

Google chrome on Gentoo


  • Thanks! I got this to work on my recent installation of Gentoo, 64-bit, with the following changes:

    1) In the URL for downloading, before clicking "Accept", edit the URL in the browser address bar and change "i386" to "amd64". Hit Enter to reload it. Now, you will be downloading the 64-bit version.

    2) Google and Debian now use lzma for compression (similar to bzip2 and gzip). Extract it with this command, instead:

    lzma -cd data.tar.lzma | tar xvf -

    The tar command doesn't yet have built-in lzma support, so we do it manually in a pipeline. If you don't have the lzma program yet, emerge lzma-utils.

    3) For the nspr libraries, Gentoo now has them as .so.8 instead of .so.7, so change the commands accordingly. You'll also need "sudo" in front of these, as well.

    Tried running it, and it gave me an error about the "chrome-sandbox" program not being mode 4755. I did "sudo chmod 4755 chrome-sandbox" and it seemed to work OK after that. It's kind of scary that Google would want to put a setuid root program on your system. What are they doing with it? A Web browser shouldn't need to run as root!

    I'm posting this from Google Chrome running on 64-bit Gentoo :)

    Josh
  • Eddy
    Bleah, odio sporcare il mio gentoo...
  • The ln line should be changed to the following:
    sudo ln -s /opt/chrome/chrome /usr/bin/

    I get the following message at the end:
    chrome: /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.1.2/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9' not found (required by chrome)
  • Yeah, It's cool - also you can find ebuild in bugzilla:
    https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272805
  • super cool. many thanks

    a few of my libs were different, just minor stuff using 8 instead of 7
    ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libplds4.so.8 /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d
    ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libplc4.so.8 /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d
    ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libnspr4.so.8 /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d

    this totall rocks thanks
  • Thanks a lot for sharing!
  • Clean /usr/lib
    If you dont want to pollute your /usr/lib you can write a simple wrapper. I keep symbolic links to libraries under /opt/google/chrome/ldpreload and use this to start chrome:

    #!/bin/sh

    LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/google/chrome/ldpreload"
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

    /opt/google/chrome/chrome
  • Haripriya S
    Hey,
    Thank you sooo much :). Very useful stuff :)
  • chrome-sandbox
    Anyone solved chrome-sandbox problem?
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