Chromium is the Open Source project behind Google’s browser Chrome. It aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. Indeed as I type this on Chromium on an Ubuntu laptop, I can truly feel the speed. While Chromium on Linux is still in the pre-release stage, it does seem very stable, and could very well be a backup browser to Firefox if not completely replace it.
Around last year, we jumped through hoops by means of Wine and Codeweavers to get Chromium up and running on Linux (and Mac.) Luckily things have evolved since last year; today we have a daily build of Chromium on Linux, and Ubuntu even has its own PPA!
If you ever ventured into the Chromium territory on Linux, you will probably be disappointed that Flash doesn’t work straight out of the box. However, a very simple hack will solve that and make Chromium a usable browser (we are praying for the day Adobe Flash dies, but thats another issue.)
If you are on Ubuntu, you should just use the PPA. While other distros will probably different ways to get the daily builds (Google is a friend). However getting Flash to work would probably be the same across the board.
Installing Chromium
If you never added software from a PPA, here is what you should do to get Chromium:
Add these two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main
You may want to add the corresponding GPG key to your apt keyring.
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 4E5E17B5
Update:
sudo apt-get update
Install:
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
Getting Flash To Work
Now to get Flash running, we basically need to create a symbolic link of libflashplayer.so in the Chromium plugin folder:
cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugin
sudo ln -s ../../flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so
One final step is to change the execution command to your Chromium icon to this (Note these flags have two “-“, for some reason WordPress is rendering only one):
chromium-browser --enable-plugins --enable-greasemonkey --enable-user-scripts --enable-extensions
Thats it! If you face any problems, just leave a comment or @rtaibah on Twitter!
Update: Chromium also integerates very well with GNOME, just go to options menu > Personal Stuff > Set To GTK Theme OR even get more themes