Hi,

The topic have been treated already on the internet but since the official build of Google Chrome only landed few hours ago, some extra informations and "re-post" cannot be bad.

So ! Google Chrome is not packaged for Slackware GNU/Linux distributions, well... That's not completely unexpected. And it is not packaged as a universal GNU/Linux binary either, which is more troublesome. Anyway here is my 2 ways to install Google Chrome on Slackware 13.

Important: I made everything on my EeePC (since I'm currently in holidays snowboarding in the French Alps) which runs a Slackware 13 x86, but everything should be exactly the same on Slackware64. I also have to warn you about my own install method : it's dirty and not especially quick ;-)

Method 1: 

My own method, it's what I used to install Chrome as soon as I got the Google's email telling me the beta version of Chrome official Linux build was out in the wild ! So it's pretty dirty, and not the quickest way to do it. It's how I installed it even before thinking about looking at the web to see if something have been done by somebody else. You have been warned.

So first, download the Fedora RPM (32 or 64 bits), then run rpm2tgz :

su -c "rpm2tgz google-chrome-beta_current_i386.rpm"

Then install the resulting package. Do not waste your time to launch it, it will not start. For me the first reason is : I have not installed seamonkey and I miss the libnss3, so a quick sprint to slackbuilds.org and I had the mozilla-nss package installed (compiling and installing a package from a slackbuild script is very well documented on slackbuilds.org).

Almost, but it does not launch... The  reason is, some poor links against libnss3. Well, at this point, I know I will not back off ! Let's shoot some ln shots !

ln -s /usr/lib/libnss3.so /usr/lib/libnss3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/libsmime3.so /usr/lib/libsmime3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/libssl3.so /usr/lib/libssl3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/libplds4.so /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib/libplc4.so /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib/libnspr4.so /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d

If you are running a Slackware 64, just replace /usr/lib/ by /usr/lib64/ and if you are using this way to install Google Chrome, bookmark this post to be able to clean your system ;-)

If you are not very fond of the manual linking (you are a wise person), please follow the Method 2 !

Method 2:

Well, the result is the same : you will get a working Google Chrome. The path to this result is considerably easiest and quickest (given the fact you have libnss3 on your system) :

Go to slackbuilds.org and get the Google Chrome slackbuild, install it (please refer to Method 1 for the link to the howto use a slackbuild).

That's all !

As a conclusion I would say that there is the equivalent of Method 1 for the Debian 5 package, but the Slackbuild do it better than I care to explain ;-)

Enjoy Google Chrome and do not hesitate to give your feedback on it in the comments. So far for me, the difference in performance and CPU usage with Firefox on my EeePC is amazing ! I could barely run 4 tabs in Firefox, and look at the screenshot ! With 9 opened tabs it's still amazingly fast  ! I will benchmark it against Fennec soon !

Arnaud Dupuis