Chromium browser

This should take you through everything required to get the Chromium browser installed.  It's a nice quick process with not much effort required.

Pre-requisites
This tutorial has been written with the assumption that you have the Raspberry Pi up and running with a working internet connection.  For information on getting the Raspberry Pi set up, take a look here.

There are two ways that you can approach this.  The first is installing from the command before launching the X environment, the second is from the terminal once you've run startx.  To be able to capture the steps nicely I'll be capturing the steps via SSH, but the process won't differ from a standard Terminal prompt launched from the GUI.

Installing Chromium
Once you've identified how you're going to install Chromium (either from the Terminal, or when booting up before you run startx), you need to run the following installation command: sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.  This will connect to the repository, download and install Chromium.

Once you've run that you'll be prompted to confirm the components to be installed - simply hit Y.

The installation should proceed finishing with a confirmation that one


Finalsing installation
There is a final step required to complete the installation.  Generally required, although if you're performing this on a clean Debian installation, and installing this before starting up the GUI, you don't need to do this step.  Simply run the following command: sudo chown pi:pi ~/.config.  When running it nothing will happen - you sill simply be returned to the following line.
(to be completely honest, I'm not too sure what this does)

Launching Chromium
That should be it - simply browse to the Internet menu and click on the Chromium icon:

And Chromium should start up!


6 comments:

  1. Hi

    the "sudo chown pi:pi ~/.config" command changes the ownership of the file in your home directory called .config to user "pi" group "pi"

    Also to start SSH automatically at start up type:

    sudo update-rc.d ssh start 20 2 3 4 5

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  2. Excellent - thanks for the info!

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  3. Great info brother! let me ask you something... don't you think chromium is too heavy for running inside rpi? Mine's very slow...

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  4. Hey Carlos - yes, it IS a little slow, although this is one of the issues that pops up quite often. The whole aim of the Pi is to get kids back into programing, Linux, etc., and in most cases using a Notepad-like app. The problem is that with all the hype, everyone's expectations have jumped up several levels. When something this small and this cool plays something like Quake 3, you generally expect it to handle everything else quite well, but that is unfortunately not the case.

    So - overall, it DOES seem to struggle with browsing a bit. Having said that, if there's something lighter out there I'd love to try it?

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  5. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
    Package chromium-browser is not available, but is referred to by another package.
    This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
    is only available from another source

    E: Package 'chromium-browser' has no installation candidate

    So, WTF? Post your reply to jdcrunchman at gmail dot com please

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    Replies
    1. So, what is the new package name? I'm using latest Jessie...

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