Playing With Chrome on Linux

Soon after they announced, I’d been hoping to take [http://www.google.com/chrome Google Chrome] for a test drive. The [http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html comic book] laid out a lot of interesting things, my favorite being the discussion of separate processes leading to detachable (and “retachable”) browser tabs, something I have been touting for **years** as a long term [http://galeon.sourceforge.net/ Galeon] user. My big problem though? I run Linux, and Google has so far left Linux support on the back burner. Still, I figured that someone had probably made a Linux build available by now, so inspired by John McCain’s speech on TV tonight, I set about seeing if I could get it set up. Basically the process now for running Chrome on Linux revolves around getting some advanced [http://www.winehq.org/ Wine] machinery in place (links to follow), and then everything else works like a normal Wine install. One sticking point I ran into is that my Wine was configured as a win2k server, and Google requires WinXP or newer, so I had to reconfigure that before it would install. This was pretty tricky to figure out as there was absolutely zero error messages when trying to install, instead I just got a empty return to prompt. If you’re giving it a try, make sure you’re configured similarly. Anyway, after getting it up an running, I ran through a quick checklist of sites I wanted to test; [http://news.google.com/ Google news], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model Wikipedia], [http://www.slideshare.net/ Slideshare], [http://www.omniti.com/ OmniTI’s] website, and several planets all worked fine. I then did some testing of [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/?page=demo phpPgAdmin], and it seemed to work fine. This was a concern I had, given a lack of Apple products on the dev team, we already have enough issues supporting Safari (donations welcome [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/tongue.png alt=”:-P” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]]), and now PHP developers (really all web developers) now have yet another browser they can expect bug reports from. Yippee! But again, it worked well, and we have some fairly complicated javascript going on with the tree menu, so that seems good. All in all I am happy with the experiment. I don’t suspect I will really use it with any regularity, but it is interesting to play with (and who knows, maybe upgrading wine will make [http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Home phun] run better). If you’d like to get it running on your Linux, I’ve put a screenshot and the help links I used after the jump; they’re mostly Ubuntu specific, but should be easily ported to other flavors. [[image http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/uploads/chrome-screenshot.png alt=”Chrome on Ubuntu”]] primary link I used was [http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html] the other links I looked at while going through the above were: [http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb] [http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks] [http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html] [http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7]