Andrea Olivato’s Blog

This is just a quick & (very) dirty trick to run Google ChromeChrome on linuxlinux 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 GoogleGoogle 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