I’m running google chrome on FreeBSD, part 3

Well there have been a lot of work going on in the wine community and version 1.1.4 of wine released today includes some fixes for running chrome under wine emulation.

Right now i’m in the middle of compiling  wine from source and i’ll be back shortly with information about if it was a success or not…

In the mean time i hope the FreeBSD port maintainer is doing the same since i guess there will be a lot of FreeBSD users who would like to give chrome a good test run.

Btw. i guess i should mention that linux users have already have managed to run chrome under linux. But the performance isn’t the best.

I’m running google chrome on FreeBSD, part 2

After some more testing and googling i found some hints in the Wine AppDB. Apparently i needed some DLL’s from microsoft and some extra arguments for wine to get further. To get the DLL’s use winetricks and winetricks need cabextract so install that first.

So this is what got me further down the road to a working chrome on FreeBSD:

% su

#cd /usr/ports/archivers/cabextract

# make install

# exit

% rehash

% wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

% sh ./winetricks riched20 riched30

% wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/$USER/Local Settings/Application
        Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe" --new-http --in-process-plugins"

Now i managed to go to www.slashdot.org and got past the first redirect (That sends you to slahdot.org) and slashdot started to render before chrome crashed.

chrome running on FreeBSD, crash after starting to render slashdot.org

From the output of wine it seems like there is some issues with locking that isn’t implemented in wine yet, but i’ll start digging into that and see where where i will end up. The next thing to try is to test different FreeBSD threading libraries and see what that can do for us.

I’ll keep you posted when more info is available, so keep an eye on my RSS-feed.

I’m running google chrome on FreeBSD

Well kind of…

Since google chrome just recently launched and it unfortunatly only supports windows i felt a little bit dissapointed. But hey that doesn’t stop me so easy. So i decided to check out what wine (a windows api emulator for linux and FreeBSD) could do for me.

So i downloaded chrome and tried to run ChromeSetup.exe with wine. No success, wine whined about a windows sytem call regarding http not implemented. So i googled around a bit and noticed that that call was implemented in the latest wine… Did i run the latest wine? no…

After a quick portupgrade wine is upgraded to 1.1.3, but still no success. Since ChromeSetup.exe was so small i realized that there must be a bigger file out there with the real executable. strings didn’t get me far so i googled a bit more and found chrome_installer.exe approx 8 Mbyte large, this could be it.

Shure it was now i was able to install chrome and have a look at the nice tabs and look around in settings and preferences.

And things went fairly ok. Chrome looked nice but when i tried to go to google and some other pages it turned out that things wasn’t going so nice. The URL field is totally black. But since the nice suggestions beneath it where nice and clear is was mainly annoying at this point. But i’m sorry to say the only page i managed to get was a “sad page”. A graphic representation of a sad computer and the following text: “Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this web page. To continue, press Reload or go to another page.”

Well i guess that’s what you could expect from a product compiled for a totally different platform…

But i will keep on a bit more and keep you updated with my efforts on getting chrome running on FreeBSD.

But the chrome hysteria is huge. Already several Swedish newspapers are running articles about googles chrome. Some of them are here:

Aftonbladet

Dagens Nyheter

PS: If you find any hints or examples of people trying to run chrome under wine or FreeBSD, please let me know and comment on this article.