Installing Google Chrome on Ubuntu Hardy

By Jamsi • Sep 8th, 2008 • Category: Lead Story, Linux

With the release of Google Chrome last week, it was interesting to see all the articles that popped up with Linux users installing Google Chrome (Which is a windows product at present) on Linux. The biggest problem I found was that you need the latest version of WINE to get this working, and no amount of “apt-get update | apt-get install wine” will work.

Updating WINE

The first step is to update your WINE version to 1.1.4.

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

sudo apt-get update

Installing prerequisites

There’s a few software packages you need in order to get Chrome up and running. Winetricks is a script which allows you to quickly download necessary windows components.

Note: The last command below will install FIREFOX in WINE, you’ll see why in a second.

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

mv winetricks /usr/sbin/

winetricks riched20 riched30 flash msxml3 corefonts firefox

Installing Chrome

During the above process, you’ll be prompted to install FireFox 3. Proceed with the WINE installation of Firefox.
Note: Yes I know you can get around this step by not installing FireFox, but this way seems to the be the easiest way to do it.

Once Firefox is installed in Wine, RUN Firefox in WINE and visit

http://www.google.com/chrome/

Download Chrome and run the Chrome setup. It will proceed to download and install the Google Chrome browser. Once it’s complete, use the following command to run Chrome.

Running Google Chrome

wine “$HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/$USER/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe” –no-sandbox –new-http

And there you have it. A fairly simple way to get Chrome up and running on Ubuntu Hardy.

Sources: Ubuntu Forums

Related posts:

  1. Google Chrome Error 0X00000005
  2. Cannot scroll up in Google Chrome using certain touch pads
  3. Ubuntu Virtual Machine
  4. Installing BitTorrent via YUM
  5. How To Install Twhirl on Ubuntu


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Jamsi is currently studying a full time Bachelor of Computer/Business degree and working part time as an Internet Security Consultant.
Email this author | All posts by Jamsi

5 Responses »

  1. Dan Kegel on September 8th, 2008 at 10:57 pm:

    Please link to the wine appdb (especially when you post instructions taken from there!).
    The easiest URL for the Chrome appdb page is
    http://wiki.winehq.org/Chrome

  2. Jamsi on September 9th, 2008 at 9:20 am:

    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for the comments.

    I actually rumbled up some of the information from the Ubuntu forums, here’s the link.
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=10

    I was actually disappointed in a lot of the articles online, including the Wine appDB; mainly because it didn’t state how to get Wine 1.1.4 running on Ubuntu. It simply says “First, get wine-1.1.4″ - well how can I when apt-get install wine says I had the latest version! I wanted to write a straight forward guide that would appeal to new users of Ubuntu, and those that don’t know how to compile from source.

  3. Duglas on September 9th, 2008 at 12:32 pm:

    Thanks for the info. I was looking everywhere on how to update wine to 1.4.1 as the ubuntu repos seem to have the older version of wine.

  4. Mike on September 10th, 2008 at 10:39 am:

    Got my Google Chrome up and running on Ubuntu! Pity about the SSL issue though, can’t even login to gmail.. lets home the Chrome team release the linux version soon

  5. Google Chrome Ubuntu on November 26th, 2008 at 8:36 pm:

    I tried and it work very well with me

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