Friendly Tech Ninja Linux how-to's for beginners

Howto: Compile Chromium Browser on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Chromium is the open source web browser project that is the basis for Google Chrome web browser, it is know for it's blazing fast speed be it of web pages or simply launching that application. There are many advantages to compiling software yourself, one of many is the optimisation that occurs purely from doing so which just adds to the speed of the Chromium browser.

Note: I'll be upfront and say that compiling something of this size is going to that an hour or so, it does depend on the speed of your system though.

Step 1

To get started the first step to getting Chromium running on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic is to downloading and install the prerequisites, which will allow you to compile the source code.

Open up a Terminal and run this command:

sudo apt-get install subversion pkg-config python perl g++ g++-multilib bison flex gperf libnss3-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnspr4-0d libasound2-dev libnspr4-dev msttcorefonts libgconf2-dev libcairo2-dev libdbus-1-dev

Just answer yes to all the prompts and leave it to download and install everything, it'll take a few minutes.

Step 2

Now it's time to download the depot_tools, which will allow us to use the source code and the source code itself:

• depot_tools
• chromium source code

Note: The Chrome source is a couple hundred megabytes and unzipped it's over a gigabyte so downloading may take a while depending on your download speed.

Step 3

Unzip both folders and place them somewhere convenient, i just put both on my desktop.

Then go into the depot_tool directory on your desktop and select and copy all the files in there to the /src directory within the unzipped chromium source folder.

Step 4

Open up your Terminal application and navigate to that /src directory, in my case it was:

cd /Desktop/home/chrome-svn/tarball/chromium/src/

We now need to run the gclient depot_tools utility that we placed in the /src directory which basically will let us sync up with the repositories and check file consistencies and versions.

Just run the command:

./gclient sync --force

Note: It'll appear to be doing nothing for a little bit, but it'll soon start printing out things...just let it run till its done, this will take a few minutes.

Take note towards the end of the all the things it printed in your Terminal, you'll see "WARNING" come up a few times. Start at the bottom and work your way up, it'll basically ask you to delete particular directories you don't need when compiling the source code. Here are the following ones that came up for me, yours probably wont be different, but no harm in checking:

"src/third_party/ffmpeg/binaries/chromium/mac/ia32_dbg"
"src/third_party/WebKit/WebKit/mac"
"src/third_party/python_24"
"src/third_party/WebKit/WebKitLibraries"
"src/third_party/cygwin"
"src/third_party/pdfsqueeze"
"src/third_party/ffmpeg/binaries/chromium/mac/ia32"
"src/third_party/ffmpeg/binaries/chromium/win/ia32"
"src/third_party/pthreads-win32"
"src/third_party/GTM"

Delete all those directories and then your ready to start compiling!

Step 5

In the same Terminal window move into the /build directory from the current /src directory:

cd /build

In this directory simply run:

../hammer -C build chrome

Note: Make sure you enter the command with the two full stops, this is because you want to run the file hammer.py which we put in the /src directory as apart of the depot_tools that are in the previous directory to the current /build directory we're in.

Note: Compiling the source code takes about an hour, but as I said at the start it depends on the speed of your system, so don't plan on using that machine for a while as compiling the code will take up all your system resources and make it unusable.

Step 6

The compiled code will be in /src/sconsbuild/Debug directory, so to run Chromium simply double click the chrome executable!

Note: I'd recommend making a launch shortcut, this can be done by right clicking on the desktop and clicking Create Launcher..., just put in the name of your application, then browse towards the Chromium executable. If you'd like to get the Chromium icon it's in the same folder as the executable.

Congratulations, you've just compiled Chromium from source! From my experience it's been working great, i found to to run slightly fast than the pre-compiled .deb files you can get from the dev-channel (links below) it also hasn't crashes on me, hope I didn't just jinx it!

Links I used to make this howto:

• More detail on prerequisites.
• Pre-compiled .deb files from here for both 32 and 64 bit Debian based systems.
• Chromium source code here.
• Download depot_tools, you can download either compressed file i downloaded depot_tools.tar.gz.

Please leave a comment if this tutorial was helpful or you'd like to add to it.