It being a slow day, I decided to write a SlackBuild for Google Chrome's latest developer release. I've uploaded it to:

ftp://ftp.noc.soton.ac.uk/pub/pwc101...google-chrome/

It'll only work on slackware-current due to the lzma compression using in the .deb file, though if you're desperate to run it on 12.2, I'm sure you'll be able to decompress the data.tar.lzma file, perhaps using current's xz.SlackBuild: ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/s...t/source/a/xz/

Google Chrome requires GConf and ORbit2, both of which are available at SlackBuilds.org.

It can enable plugin support in Chrome (pass FLASHSUPPORT=yes), and if you want that functionality, you'll need to have the Flash plugin installed. I've used the package created by the SlackBuilds.org flash-player-plugin script. Basically, you need to have libflashplayer.so in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, otherwise it won't work. If you want to launch it from the command line, use:The launcher in the KDE menu (and XFCE's too, though I haven't checked) should automatically include the --enable-plugins flag.

The script is 64-bit aware, but I don't have a 64-bit system to hand upon which I can test it, so if someone's feeling inclined to do so, perhaps they could let me know if it works.

Any other thoughts are welcome

tnx pwc, but I have partial bad news.
using your slackbuild I discovered the google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb looks like a fake 64bit package: it has only 32bit libs and it's asking for gconf and orbit2 32bit libs.
maybe they'll release a real 64bit version in the future (or, maybe, in the meantime, I'll try to prepare some compat libs).

Thanks for looking into it. I thought that would be the case since all the documentation on the website talks of there being no 64-bit version available.

In which case, I don't know why they even bothered to release an -amd64.deb file in the first place. Seems a little strange if all it's going to do is require 32-bit libraries anyway...

Oh well. I'll put a note in the README file that it's a pseudo-64-bit build, but that you'll have to have 32-bit compatibility libraries installed.

I've also found an srware-iron linux build, but it seems to not like the version of libnss packaged in the seamonkey package -current has, so that may be a non-starter. Also, they're a couple of releases behind, so things are likely to be pretty unstable. Finding their linux source code is proving difficult, as I'd really like to be able to build this from source rather than shuffling binaries around.

Perhaps I'll have a go at building Chromium from source tonight...

So, how well does Chrome work? Is it fast and stable? I tried it on Windows but ended up sticking with Firefox. Chrome lacks Firefox's (and Seamonkey's) killer feature as far as I can tell: the ability to change the page style (CSS) on the fly, or get rid of it entirely. I love going to the view menu -> style -> no style when I hit pages that just look awful.

Other than that, I thought Chrome's performance was okay, and it's Javascript performance was pretty good.

I'm interested to see how well it works on Linux.

Regards,

Startup times under a virtual machine were better than Firefox's (qualitatively). As for styles and the like, it's still not got the fine grained control Firefox has, which is fair enough, as I don't think that's where they're trying to go. Not to mention this is a very immature project compared with Firefox, so Firefox is bound to have more features. My brief experience of it appears positive though, in terms of stability and speed.

However, the thing that bugs me most about it is the usage stats they collect, which is why I'm trying to find a build of SRWare's Iron that'll run on current (their most recent offering appears to be 3.0.189.0 compared with that build which is 3.0.196.0. Things like flash don't work in the Iron build (I'm told) whereas they do in the Chrome build.

For some reason the nss libraries packaged with firefox can crash chrome. It's better to use connie's mozilla-nss package from here:
http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/s...-nss/pkg/12.2/

I've also hacked together an install script for VectorLinux (based on Slackware) that wgets everything and handles the dependencies. I know, it's not the Slackware way, but it works well. You might be able to make the right modifications to get it to work on slackware. requires slapt-get for the tests and for lzma and GConf, GConf depends on Orbit, so slapt-get should pull it as well. Here's my script:

http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.p...66103#msg66103

For those that are interested, here's the complete log of my adventure in getting Chrome to install on Vector.

http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=10210.0

Thanks for the links.

At first, I did use the mozilla-nss build you linked to, but saw that it was possible to link against the existing nss libraries in firefox; this struck me as a better solution for two reasons:

1. The list of dependencies would be one package shorter.
2. A stock Slackware install would already include some of the necessary libraries.

However, if that causes Chrome to crash more frequently, then I'll have a look at using the mozilla-nss package instead.

To be honest, I've not really used Chrome that much since its data collection aspect still bothers me a bit. I'm waiting on Iron to get a newer Linux version out (at least build 3.0.196.0), then I'll probably take another look at it.

However, Chrome is fast, there's no denying that. But it also does less than Firefox, which I imagine contributes to that difference.

You mentioned that before. What data collection does Chrome do?

That, for me, is the crux of the issue. If it does less, or at least doesn't do what I want, then I won't use it. My testing in Windows showed Chrome to be a neat browser, but not a great one.

According to SRWare's Iron page, the following is collected. This is what they remove when they patch the Chromium source code:I don't have anything to hide, and my browsing habits are spectacularly uninteresting, really, but it's the principle of the matter more than anything.

Today I stumbled upon the Chromium Slackware build on Slacky-eu.
Installed it (and it's many dependencies...) and surfed the web with it.
The start-up is fast, but the rendering of the pages isn't really faster IMHO. In fact, on this site, it's slower.
Chromium is light, but annoyingly "unbloated". Try to autoscroll, change the fonts, block adds. It's just not there. Maybe this will all be present in Chromium some day, but at the moment, it's just not my thing.
Haven't had any crashes though, not even with Flash...

BTW, I made a Firefox search plugin for Slacky-eu that enables you to search the SW 13 repositories on their site, you can find it at Mycroft's.

Thanks for the search plugins for Slack-eu, I use them with Google-chrome 4.0.202.2 / Slackware-12.2 (with some edit I can search Slackware-13.0 or 12.2).