How can I help port Google Chrome to Linux?

Question

I really enjoy Chrome, and the sheer exercise of helping a port would boost my knowledge-base.

Where do I start?

What are the fundamental similarities and differences between the code which will operated under Windows and Linux?

What skills and software do I need?

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Note:

The official website is Visual Studio oriented!
Netbeans or Eclipse are my only options.
I will not pay Microsoft to help an Open Source project.

Answer 1

EDIT: (2/6/10)

A Beta version of Chrome has been released for Linux. Although it is labeled beta, it works great on my Ubuntu box. You can download it from Google:

http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux

EDIT: (5/31/09)

Since I answered this question, there have been more new developments in Chrome (actually "Chromium") for Linux: An alpha build has been released. This means it's not fully functional.

If you use Ubuntu, you're in luck: add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Then, at the command line:

aptitude update
aptitude install chromium-browser

Don't forget to s/jaunty/yourUbuntuVersion/ if necessary. Also, you can s/aptitude/apt-get/, if you insist.

And.... Yes, it works. I'm typing this in my freshly installed Chromium browser right now!

The build is hosted by launchpad, and gave me some security warnings upon install, which I promptly ignored. Here's the website: https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

The original answer:

Linux Build Instructions

Answer 2

Read this article on Chrome and Open Source on Linux:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/09/02/google-unveils-chrome-source-code-and-linux-port

The Google V8 JavaScript Engine is also open source and available here if you want to contribute;

http://code.google.com/p/v8/

If you want to contribute on Chronium, here are the instructions:

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/contributing-code

Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web. This site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code.

Here is how you can get started:

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/getting-started

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EDIT: Two more questions was added to the original question.

Building on Linux requires the following software:

• Subversion >= 1.4
• pkg-config >= 0.20
• Python >= 2.4
• Perl >= 5.x
• gcc/g++ >= 4.2
• bison >= 2.3
• flex >= 2.5.34
• gperf >= 3.0.3
• libnss3-dev >= 3.12

On Ubuntu 8.04, you can fetch all of the above as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install subversion pkg-config python perl g++ bison flex gperf libnss3-dev

Note: There is no working Chromium-based browser on Linux. Although many Chromium submodules build under Linux and a few unit tests pass, all that runs is a command-line "all tests pass" executable.