Installing chromium browser?

[Zebulon Walton]

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but I don't seem to be able to install the chromium web browser from the command line. Running apt install chromium-browser doesn't work...

Code:

[mobian@mobian ~]$ sudo apt install chromium-browser
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree     
Reading state information... Done
Package chromium-browser is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'chromium-browser' has no installation candidate

Trying apt install chromium doesn't work either, but it suggests another package...

Code:

[mobian@mobian ~]$ sudo apt-get install chromium
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree     
Reading state information... Done
Package chromium is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
  chromium-bsu

However,"chromium-bsu" appears to be a shoot-em-up space game:



https://packages.debian.org/sid/chromium-bsu



So -- how to install the chromium browser? Is there another repository that needs to be added?

[nas]

This says the chromium browser has moved to snap releases. You can try a deb package from here but don't know if it will work.

[Zebulon Walton]

This says the chromium browser has moved to snap releases. You can try a deb package from here but don't know if it will work.

Ugh. A whole new world of hurt where things can go horribly wrong. I primarily use Firefox anyway but some sites work better with Chromium. So I held my nose and attempted the installation...

Code:

apt install snapd
snap install core
snap install chromium

Unfortunately it didn't work, snap exits with an error when attempting to install the browser.

Code:

[mobian@mobian ~]$ sudo snap install chromium
error: cannot perform the following tasks:
- Mount snap "chromium" (1428) ([start snap-chromium-1428.mount] failed with exit status 1: Job failed.

So I just uninstalled the whole mess ("apt purge snapd") and will live without it for now.

[gizmuth]

I do believe that this is a Debian problem, I heard that Chromium is a tricky bit of software to be maintained  in Debian and I saw that it might have even been removed from sid and testing for now so fingers crossed they get it back in before the freeze

[Zebulon Walton]

I do believe that this is a Debian problem, I heard that Chromium is a tricky bit of software to be maintained  in Debian and  I saw that it might have even been removed from sid and testing for now so fingers crossed they get it back in before the freeze

It seems that all the newer Debian-derived distributions are using the snap version of Chromium. I've read that the latest Mint has snapd locked out and Chromium unavailable unless the user manually removes the block.

I'm suspicious of anything coming from Google but at least Chromium is open-source so in theory what's in it is known, versus Chrome which might have anything hidden inside.

[rocket2nfinity]

Try Falkon. It works pretty good. Has a type inputting quirk on some distros. But renders webpages well.

[agisga]

I was able to successfully install chromium on mobian using flatpak:

sudo apt install flatpak  # but it was already installed for some reason
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub org.chromium.Chromium

Chromium seems to run perfectly fine (based on playing around with it for the last 30 minutes).

[LibrePhoneUser]

Isn't Chromium still dependent on X11, while Mobian's Phosh shell is Wayland-based? Yes, one can still run X11 apps through XWayland, but that is not ideal appearance-wise, and I assume that running X11 apps involves extra memory overheard when this device is already so RAM poor.

[Zebulon Walton]

I was able to successfully install chromium on mobian using flatpak:

sudo apt install flatpak  # but it was already installed for some reason
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub org.chromium.Chromium

Chromium seems to run perfectly fine (based on playing around with it for the last 30 minutes).

Thanks, I installed it and it works fine. In fact, Chromium seems to run noticeably faster on the Pinephone than Firefox does. The only issue I've run into so far is that it doesn't seem to work with X forwarding. (Firefox does.)

Code:

[mobian@mobian ~]$ send flatpak run org.chromium.Chromium

[2:2:0122/184020.513615:ERROR:browser_main_loop.cc(1438)] Unable to open X display.

(The send() bash function is from another thread on the forum and had to be modified to accept additional command line parameters. Running Chromium from the command line works directly on the Pinephone from the Kings Cross terminal.)

[Zebulon Walton]

Aside from not working with X forwarding, another issue with the flatpack edition of Chromium seems to be that "scale-to-fit" cannot be used to scale it to the screen since there is no APP-ID associated with it. Items in the browser can be resized using keyboard commands, which helps, but there appears to be no way to scale the browser window itself. So for example to manipulate settings it is necessary to keep switching between portait and landscape modes to get at everything.