How to install Chromium browser on Fedora 23

Chromium browser on Fedora 23

The Chromium browser is the open source version of Google Chrome browser and has pretty much all the features that Chrome has, excluding proprietary plugins.

Chromium is not available in the default repositories of Fedora yet.

So it has to installed from a different repository.

The instructions are made available at the following page -
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chromium

1. Setup the "spot" repository

Run the following command to setup the Chromium repository located at -

https://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium/

$ su -c "wget https://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium/fedora-chromium-stable.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-chromium-stable.repo"

Install the key

$ sudo rpm --import https://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium/spot.gpg

2. Install Chromium with dnf

Now install the chromium package with the dnf command. All necessary dependencies are also pulled in automatically.

$ sudo dnf install chromium

That should finish the job. Now you should be able to launch Chromium from the applications list.

3. Install flash on Chromium

One thing that remains incomplete is flash support. Chromium now uses Pepper API based plugins so the old NPAPI based flash plugins from Adobe will not work.

Google Chrome comes with the pepper flash plugin inbuilt, but Chromium does not include it. Pepper Flash for Fedora is available from 3rd party repositories like RussianFedora.

To get the flash player for Chromium, download the rpm file directly from the following url -

Extract the contents of the rpm using file-roller archive manager.

$ file-roller --extract-here ./chromium-pepper-flash-20.0.0.306-1.fc23.R.x86_64.rpm

After extracting the contents, navigate into the directory, and copy the PepperFlash directory to the following location where chromium is installed - /usr/lib64/chromium-browser/

$ sudo cp -R  PepperFlash/ /usr/lib64/chromium-browser/

Now restart Chromium, and visit http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ and it should show that Flash is installed and working. Or open the url chrome://plugins and you should see any entry named "Adobe Flash Player".