In spite of appearances, people seldom know what they want until you give them what they ask for - Gerald M. Weinberg
Installing Chromium on Linux in 5 seconds
By Fabio on Friday June 5th 2009 06:34 | Category: Tutorials
Being a pretty recent convert myself I know that some things on Linux can be a little shaky at first and one of those things is installing software. I'm here to help you out with a little bash scripting and magic.
There are several ways to install software of which I find Apt-get the easiest by far. To install Chromium via apt-get all you need to do actually is add the daily builds repository and run apt-get install to fetch and install it. But even though this isn't rocket science it can be a bit tricky for Linux youngsters and actually I find the process of manually adding the repository annoying and unnecessary.
So I wrote a little bash script which automates the process and makes for a much easier install. All you need to do is run the script and you will end up with Chromium cleanly installed and ready to run!
NOTE: This script only applies to systems running apt-get as their software manager. Mainly Debian derivatives like Ubuntu have apt-get by default.
I'll break the script down so you might just want to see what it does.
0. Getting root privilages.
sudo su
You will be asked for your root password, once you have obtained root access run the pieces of code below.
1. Adding the Chromium daily builds repository to your sources list.
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
What this does is add a line of code containing the source link to your repository list so that apt knows from where to get it's sources.
2. Fetch the required key authentication file.
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
The repositories are encrypted with a private key so this ads the public key needed to access the sources, basically this is a key for the lock.
3. Update your sources list.
sudo apt-get update
Kind of speaks for itself, here you update your source listing so that apt-get is aware of the fact that there are new sources and software available.
4. Actually installing the Chromium browser
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
This tells apt-get to fetch and install the chromium browser which is what you actually want of course.
PLEASE NOTE: all above scripts must be run as root (sudo) else it just won't work. I recommend downloading the bash file below and execute it as root, this will take care of the privileges automatically.
How to handle the script:
First off, download the shell script here and make it executable.
then open a terminal window and CD to the location where the file has been saved. for example the Desktop:
cd /home/YOUR USERNAME/Desktop
Then simpy run:
sudo sh install_chromium.sh
The script will do the rest for you, easy right?
100% working for all systems running apt-get as their software manager.
Tags
Spread the word
Posts you might like
Comments
You need to login in order to respond
