Chromium browser on Fedora ARM (23, LXDE) - Raspberry Pi 2
One of the few things missing from the official Fedora repositories is the Chromium browser. On an i686 or x86_64 system its pretty easy to find the correct Chromium build and install it. Sadly on ARM it seems like nobody is building it (not even the Chromium build bots, last version is from 2014). Recently I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 2 and naturally installed Fedora 23 with LXDE on it using the exquisite multiboot tool BerryBoot. So far it’s running great, and even Mono works on it! About Chromium though:
First off, it is possible, and it’s not a terribly hard thing to do with a little help from our friends from openSUSE to whom I give huge props for building Chromium browser for our devices.
Arch Linux also builds Chromium for ARM but I got strangled by the dependencies and decided to go with the openSUSE RPM. The big plus for openSUSE version is that it embeds needed libraries (or most of them) to the Chromium package. The rest of the libraries are available by default in Fedora.
Anyway, I found the openSUSE ARM repository here (I know it’s strange, I think thats the YumRepository’s ftp server):
ftp://195.220.108.108/linux/opensuse/ports/update/13.1/armv7hl/
or
http://download.opensuse.org/ports/update/13.1/armv7hl/
thanks to Daniel!
and voila, there was a Chromium rpm package for ARM from a week ago! Sadly it doesn’t install but with some trickery Chromium works. So do the following in your home directory (or somewhere else):
mkdir chromium
cd chromium
wget ftp://195.220.108.108/linux/opensuse/ports/update/13.1/armv7hl/chromium-47.0.2526.106-119.1.armv7hl.rpm
wget ftp://195.220.108.108/linux/opensuse/ports/update/13.1/armv7hl/chromium-ffmpegsumo-47.0.2526.106-119.1.armv7hl.rpm
That is everything you need to run Chromium (hopefully). Please check before copy pasting if there is a newer version!
After this you need to extract (not install) the packages:
rpm2cpio chromium-47.0.2526.106-119.1.armv7hl.rpm | cpio -idmv
rpm2cpio chromium-ffmpegsumo-47.0.2526.106-119.1.armv7hl.rpm | cpio -idmv
And lastly you need to fix some permissions:
sudo chown root ./usr/lib/chromium/chrome-sandbox
sudo chmod 4755 ./usr/lib/chromium/chrome-sandbox
After this you are finished and you can run Chromium with:
./usr/lib/chromium/chromium
Of course you can setup shortcuts but they depend on your desktop environment.
Performance #
I still think Chromium is the best browser for the RPi2 and it works great on my device. Extensions are running fine too. Occasionally it throws some warnings to the console but it never crashes. Youtube is running great if you set the quality to 360p. Obviously it eats RAM like every Chrom* browser but it is very smooth and fast. It seems to me that it is running 100% the same as the Chromium build in the official Ubuntu ARM repository.
The only bad thing about it is that you had to read this to install it. :(
Hopefully in the future it will be as easy as:
sudo dnf install chromium
Till then, have a great day! :)
