Revision 16 as of 2009-04-28 17:47:40

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Special Note

This page is incomplete. There is not yet a working Chromium application for Linux. This page aims to provide the best available instructions to Ubuntu users who want to be involved in the Chromium project. Best instructions can be found at http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code

Introduction

Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web. This site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with the Terminal. Visit UsingTheTerminal to learn more about the Terminal.

Get dependencies

Chromium requires libraries to successfully compile. You can get libraries by issuing the following command in your Terminal window: 

sudo apt-get install subversion pkg-config g++ g++-multilib bison flex gperf libnss3-dev libgconf2-dev libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnspr4-0d libnspr4-dev msttcorefonts libfreetype6-dev libcairo2-dev

Optionally you can also install the following packages for layout tests by issuing the following command in your Terminal window: 

sudo apt-get install wdiff lighttpd php5-cgi sun-java6-fonts

Install the depot tools

Checkout the depot tools from the chromium repository and save them to the local directory ~/bin/depot_tools 

svn co http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/depot_tools/linux ~/bin/depot_tools

Now you need to add the depot tools to your $PATH with the following command: 

echo "export PATH=~/bin/depot_tools:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc

Close your Terminal window and open a new one to test the depot tools. Issue the following command: 

gclient

Bootstrap using the tarball

The Chromium codebase consists of hundreds of thousands of files, which means that a checkout straight from the Subversion (SVN) repository can take a long time. To speed up the process, get a tarball that you can use to bootstrap the download. This can be accomplished by entering the following command in your Terminal window: 

wget http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/archives/chromium.r14590.tgz

Next extract the tarball to a directory of your choice (in this example your home directory). The chromium tarball has a strange directory structure. After you unpack the tarball you will want to move a subfolder and delete the folders that contained it. You can accomplish this by issuing the following command in your Terminal window: 

tar -xvf ~/chromium.r14590.tgz; mv ~/home/chrome-svn/tarball/chromium ~/src/chromium; rm -rf ~/home

Update Chromium to the latest revision

cd ~/src/chromium

gclient sync

Build the source

cd ~/src/chromium/src/build

To build the chrome application you should issue the following command in your Terminal window: 

hammer app

Running Chrome

Build products can now be found in ~/src/chromium/src/sconsbuild/Debug. To run the chrome application, issue the following command in your Terminal window: 

~/src/chromium/src/sconsbuild/Debug/chrome

External Links

For more information about Chromium see the following links