Thursday, November 19, 2009

Run Google Chrome as a non-root user on Linux


This guide applies to Ubuntu or other Debian-like system. It should be similar on other distributions.

Google provides the Linux version of Chrome in *.deb package. To install it, you need the root privilege. But what if you just want to try it and don't feel comfortable to install this unstable version in your system? Following these steps, you can try it with a regular user account.

Step 1: Download

As of this writing, the stable release of Google Chrome is not available yet. We can download the experimental version from the development channel. The URL is:
        http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel#TOC-Linux

Look for the Linux section and download the package suitable for your system.

Step 2: Unpack

Create a directory where you want to put the unpacked Google Chrome. E.g.
        mkdir ~/chrome

Extract the Google Chrome package to that directory.
        dpkg -x google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb ~/chrome

Step 3: Run

Now you are ready to run it.
        cd ~/chrome/opt/google/chrome
        ./chrome

The current Google Chrome for Linux is not stable yet, so you don't want to use it for serious e-business.

3 comments:

Aaron said...

Chrome fails to run... looks like it needs a specific path (/opt/google...), which I do not have permissions to create:

[12104:12104:174724274303:FATAL:zygote_host_linux.cc(128)] The SUID sandbox helper binary is missing: /opt/google/chrome/chrome-sandbox Aborting now.

viz kenobi said...

Yeah, I too get the same problem[The SUID sandbox helper binary is missing....]. Is there a way around that?

Anonymous said...

The only workaround that I've found so far is to run without the sandbox. Execute with the option --no-sandbox.

But be aware that there are security risks when doing so.

 
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