installing chrome for ChromeOS under linux

[Kirk Reiser]

I have found that chrome from ChromeOS runs quite nicely on my debian
sid linux machine. It will most likely work just as well under other
distributions. I have also found that it is the best browser
experience I have had under linux to date.

This particular set of binaries I built on December 2nd 2016 from the
chromium source repository.  It consists of two tarballs
chromium.tar.gz and usr_share_chromeos-assets.tar.gz. The first
contains the binaries from the build while the second is the speech
and tools frome google voice.

You can download them with curl or wget from my web site
https://reisers.ca with:

wget https://reisers.ca/chromium.tar.gz
wget https://reisers.ca/usr_share_chromeos-assets.tar.gz

You will need to have xorg and it's recommended extra packages
installed as well as the xinit package.

I am pretty much strictly a linux console user so getting these
binaries to work under gnome or other X windows managers I cannot help
with.

They run almost completely as a standard user with root permission
only necessary to install the voices and the chrome-sandbox.

Unpack as root or sudo the voices with:

sudo tar zxf usr_share_chromeos-assets.tar.gz

Unpack the chromium tarball anywhere you'd like to keep it in your
home directory tree with:

tar zxf chromium.tar.gz

Next set the root permissions on the sandbox with:

sudo chown root.root chromium/chrome-sandbox
sudo chmod 4755 chromium/chrome-sandbox

I have written two small scripts startchrome and newchrome to start up
the chrome browser. Startchrome is a very much stripped down version
of startx that I use to call xinit with only enough parameters to
start the browser with no other window manager or desktop. The second
newchrome is a one liner to call startchrome in the current directory
and start a log file for debugging.

You can place the newchrome script anywhere you like in your search
path providing you modify it to point at the startchrome script
wherever you unpacked the tarball. You could also just make a symlink
to newchrome from someplace in your search path. I.E. I put all my
scripts in a bin directory in my home tree and have a symlink in there
to start chrome.

ln -s ~/chromium/newchrome ~/bin/chrome

When you first start it up it will just go quiet because by default
chrome-os doesn't start up talking. It also takes a while to load. To
start the chromevox access type control-alt-z and shortly thereafter
you should hear a tic-toc noise from a low pitch to a high pitch. Once
you have chromevox running it will continue working until you hit
control-alt-z again to toggle it off. You can start and quit chrome as
often as you like and the it will come up talking each time. It does
take a while to actual start talking after starting the program. I
typically leave it running a console and just move to that console
when I want to browse the web or look something up.

Chrome and X are very greedy about taking over the keyboard so your
normal speakup review functions will not work. You can leave the
chrome console however with control-alt-f1-fn to get back to a console
where your review functions work just fine again.

You can leave chrome by hitting control-shift-q twice quickly.

The Windows key is the chromevox key and you use it in conjunction
with other key combinations to provide it's review functions. I shall
indicate the chromevox key as crv hereafter.

A few key combinations to get you started are crv-r to read from the
cursor to the bottom of the page. crv-ctrl-left-arrow to move to top
of page and crv-ctrl-right-arrow to move to the bottom. Crv-up and
crv-down to move up a line and down respectively. crv-right to move to
the next object and crv-left to move to the previous. Crv-dot or
period will place you into chromevox's option menu with a list of the
currently available review functions.

You can move from object to object on a site with the tab and
shift-tab key combinations. You can move from each tab or window with
control-tab and control-shift-tab. You return to the parent tab/window
with alt-left-arrow.


If for some reason chrome doesn't cooperate right off the bat and
either stay running or start talking there is a chrome.log file
created in your home directory which usually provides the information
needed to figure what is either not installed or preventing
progress. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult to figure what it is
telling you but I've found you can figure it out with a little
consideration. Often it is because it can't find some library it is
expecting to provide a necessary service.

I'm sure there are piles of things I've forgot to put in this document
and there's even more I don't know yet about chrome but so far it's
the only browser I've found to work on every site I've tried. I still
haven't figured out how to get it to play streams that are started
from playlist files like m3u or pls but I'm sure it can be done. There
are loads of chrome extensions that can be installed and I'd be very
interested in hearing what folks find to do various tasks. I've found
simple-rss is a not bad rss reader but there may be better ones
available I haven't found yet.

Good luck and let me know how it goes getting this set-up. You can
contact me at kirk at reisers.ca to let me know what you think.


-- 
Well that's it then, colour me secure!

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