Building Chromium for Slackware64

Chromium, the browser, can sometimes seem a bit evasive on the Slackware64 platform. For a start, the binaries more commonly distributed are either deb or rpm files, and although Slackware with the 13.37 release has gone the extra mile to accomodate a new browser and added a build script for Google-Chrome under extra/ in the repositories, there is none for Chromium.

I've just tried the build script, and after one year it still works with current versions of the official Google browser. All it does is repackage a Debian x64 bit binary which you can get from the Google-Chrome site. Dependency requirements do not seem to have changed.

What if what you really want is to update your Chromium rather than move to Google-Chrome? I haven't been able to find a more recent version than 16 anywhere for Slackware64. SalixOS don't seem to provide Chromium in their repositories, most of the other derivatives are still 32 bit only, SlackBuilds.org seems stuck on 15 (although you may edit the script and copy the linked URL, then paste and edit it to go to http://gsdview.appspot.com/chromium-browser-official/ to find all more recent versions there, not sure this method will work though as I would expect them to update the page if possible.) The great Slacky.eu repository has Chromium 20 available, but again only for 32 bit. So what's the ingenious user to do?

Go to the source folder and download all, currently five, files in it into a build folder in your home directory. You'll need to adjust the SlackBuild for x86_64 architecture, and possibly alter the tag to identify it as a package you built locally for your system, so change -sl to something more descriptive for yourself. Become root to execute the SlackBuild.


# Set variables:
CWD=`pwd`
OUTPUT=${OUTPUT:-$CWD}
PKGNAME=chromium
TMP=${TMP:-/tmp/txz/$PKGNAME}
PKG=$TMP/package
VERSION=${VERSION:-20.0.1104.0}
ARCH=${ARCH:-x86_64} # i686 or x86_64
JOBS=${JOBS:--j2}
BUILD=${BUILD:-9}
TAG=${TAG:-sl}


Apparently this build script has been inspired greatly by the Arch community and has been adapted from AUR. It shows in that you don't have to download the source separately, the script will connect and download the latest official version for you as part of the process, before it goes on to compile Chromium for you. And that's it. At the end you should have something like chromium-20.0.1104.0-x86_64-9atl.txz in your directory. Always nice to find out when something actually worked, and you done it, at least part of it. Thanks to the author Andrea Sciucca.

If the above is too much, I've mirrored the necessary files here. The resulting binary was 29.2 Mb, approx. five more than the previous one, and I'm not sure whether this is due to Chromium having grown in code size or if due to the compile process. By now I have a lot of stuff and multimedia libraries on my system it could have linked against, so I'm hesitant to put my package up here. Better try for yourself. One thing I already noticed is that fonts look a lot nicer with the self made package, rather than the one previously downloaded from slacky.