How to install Google Chrome on Ubuntu (for technotards)

Note: If you're a more advanced user, you might prefer learning how to install all of Google's software repositories.

Ubuntu provides a debranded version of Chrome called Chromium. In my experience, however, there are some other features missing and, to be honest, I like the branded Chrome better.

You would think that you could just download the Chrome installer from Google and it would just work - but in many cases it doesn't. The Chrome installer actually requires Chromium to be installed first.

Note: Check out So I installed Ubuntu... Now what? for a one-shot command that will install Chrome as well as perform several other common (and important) tasks for a freshly installed Ubuntu.

Using Ubuntu Software Center

There's actually a bug in the installer released by Google (it's missing some dependency information), so in order to install Chrome, you must first install Chromium.

Chromium is simply a de-branded Google Chrome with fewer built-in handlers for video and audio. By installing Chromium, we're making sure that none of the pieces for regular Chrome are missing.

1. Open Ubuntu Software Center
2. Search for Chromium
3. Click on Chromium Web Browser
4. Click Install
5. Authenticate with your password
6. Allow the installation to continue from the "untrusted sources", if asked

(Then go do the same for Chromium BSU if you want... it's an awesome old-school arcade game.)

While that's downloading and installing head over to http://google.com/chrome and begin downloading the one that sounds it would work for a 64-bit version of Ubuntu (which is based on Debian) If you're not sure, guess: nothing is going to blow up.

Choose to save the file rather than open it. It will probably default to the downloads folder. Chill out. You worry too much. It's going to be okay. :-D

Next steps

1. Wait for Chromium to finish installing and Chrome to finish downloading

* (if you can't tell, guess, you're probably right)

1. Close out of all the things you have open so you have some nice clear space to breathe.

* (deep breaths)

1. Open Dash and you should see the chrome download on the screen (just guess)
2. If you can't figure it out then type 'chrome' and see if that helps
3. Click on the chrome installer to install it (if you were wrong, no big deal, try agian)

* Note you can also access it from the Downloads folder (which you can search in Dash)

1. The Ubuntu Software Center should have opened with the option to install Chrome. Install it.
2. Once the install is complete, you can open Chrome from Dash
3. If asked, make it your default browser and submit usage statistics
4. Once Chrome is open, alternate click (either two-finger or right click) on the Chrome icon in the dock and select "Lock to Launcher"
5. Also, go ahead and login with your gmail account

You're done. You don't need to follow the Terminal steps (they're just for people who want to do things the quick and easy way)

Using Terminal

If you prefer doing things the quick and easy way, you Open Terminal (from Dash) and run these commands (copy, paste, enter):

1. This will add Google's "key" to the list of trusted keys for Ubuntu Software Center (meaning all Google software - Google Earth, Google Music Manager, etc - can be installed)

    KEY_URL='https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub'
    wget -q -E "${KEY_URL}" -O - | sudo apt-key add -
   

2. Add Google's Chrome repository to Ubuntu Software Center

    REPO="deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main"
    echo "${REPO}" > /tmp/google-chrome.list
    sudo mv /tmp/google-chrome.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
    sudo apt-get update
   

3. Install Chrome

    sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable
   

A note to the experts

You can also download google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb or google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb manually and install it directly with dpkg -i, but you'll get errors and then need to run sudo apt-get install -yf afterwards to clean it up.

pushd /tmp
GCARCH=i386
if [ -n "`arch | grep 64`" ]; then GCARCH=amd64; fi
sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get install -y chromium-browser wget && \
wget -c \
  https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_${GCARCH}.deb && \
sudo dpkg -i ./google-chrome-stable_current_${GCARCH}.deb ; \
sudo apt-get install -yf && \
popd

Note: The if [ -n ... stuff is to figure out whether you're on a 32-bit or 64-bit system - because the file that must be downloaded is different for each.

Note: The reason that the dpkg step is done twice is just in case there are any dependencies not included by chromium-browser that will fail to be present during the install - they will be slated for installation and then installed by apt-get install -yf and then the final dpkg -i completes the install.

The libnss error message

If you get an error message about libcurl3 or libnspr4-0d, it's because the Google Chrome .deb package doesn't properly instruct Ubuntu Software Center to install them. You can install them manually without installing chromium-browser, but to me installing chromium-browser seems like a simpler solution - and likely to work for future versions of Chrome as the libraries it depends on get updated.

sudo apt-get intsall -y libcurl3 libnspr4-0d
pushd ~/Downloads
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_*.deb
popd

By AJ ONeal


Did I make your day?
Buy me a coffee  

(you can learn about the bigger picture I'm working towards on my patreon page )

---

---