Running Chrome/Chromium on Linux without root

[Yang Zhang]

Is there any way to run Chrome/Chromium on Linux (Ubuntu,
specifically) without root? Are there any statically linked,
"stand-alone" binaries? Packages are available but they require root
to be installed. Building from source seems daunting (requiring at
least 100GB of disk space). Thanks in advance.
--
Yang Zhang
http://www.mit.edu/~y_z/

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Yang Zhang <yangha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there any way to run Chrome/Chromium on Linux (Ubuntu,
> specifically) without root? Are there any statically linked,
> "stand-alone" binaries? Packages are available but they require root
> to be installed. Building from source seems daunting (requiring at
> least 100GB of disk space). Thanks in advance.

Last I heard, the sandboxing technique Chrome uses requires the
installation of a suid root binary so you are not going to get the
full chrome functionality without being installed as root, even if you
compile from source.

That said, with many packages you can unpack them and run them without
installing them (or being root), so on the command line you can do
something like
$ ar x google-chrome-beta_current_amd64.deb
$ unlzma < data.tar.lzma | tar -x
$ usr/bin/google-chrome

(This can of course also be done with the GUI)

I don't know whether this works with Chrome though. It may not because
the sandbox path is hardcoded, see
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=31519

--
John C. McCabe-Dansted

[Alexander Skwar]

Hi.

2010/2/10 Yang Zhang <yangha...@gmail.com>

Is there any way to run Chrome/Chromium on Linux (Ubuntu,
specifically) without root? Are there any statically linked,
"stand-alone" binaries? Packages are available but they require root
to be installed. Building from source seems daunting (requiring at
least 100GB of disk space).

You are exaggerating. Chromium itself requires "only"

4 GB of HD space on my ArchLinux system.

OTOH: What do you mean with "require root to

be installed"? How do you install root (ie. a user

account)? And lastly, to my knowledge, there are

NO Linux distributions out there, which lack a root

account.

Alexander
--
↯ Keine Internetzensur in Deutschland! ↪ http://zensursula.net ↩ ↯
↯    Lifestream (Twitter, Blog, …) ↣ http://alexs77.soup.io/     ↯
↯ Chat (Jabber/Google Talk) ↣ a.s...@gmail.com , AIM: alexws77  ↯

Sent from Winterthur, ZH, Switzerland

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 3:43 PM, Alexander Skwar <a.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> 2010/2/10 Yang Zhang <yangha...@gmail.com>
>>
>> Is there any way to run Chrome/Chromium on Linux (Ubuntu,
>> specifically) without root? Are there any statically linked,

<snip>

> account)? And lastly, to my knowledge, there are
> NO Linux distributions out there, which lack a root
> account.

But there are plenty of linux machines that neither I or Yang Zhang
have the root password for.

Although you need to be root to install packages on most Linux
distributions you can unpack them and run them without

installing them (or being root), so on the command line you can do
something like
$ ar x google-chrome-beta_current_amd64.deb
$ unlzma < data.tar.lzma | tar -x

$ opt/google/chrome/google-chrome

This can of course also be done with the GUI.

This seems to work. One caveat however:
last I heard, the sandboxing technique Chrome uses requires the
installation of a suid root binary so you may not get the

full chrome functionality without being installed as root, even if you

compile from source. Also, I understand that the

[Yang Zhang]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 2:43 AM, Alexander Skwar <a.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> 2010/2/10 Yang Zhang <yangha...@gmail.com>
>>
>> Is there any way to run Chrome/Chromium on Linux (Ubuntu,
>> specifically) without root? Are there any statically linked,
>> "stand-alone" binaries? Packages are available but they require root
>> to be installed. Building from source seems daunting (requiring at
>> least 100GB of disk space).
>
> You are exaggerating. Chromium itself requires "only"
> 4 GB of HD space on my ArchLinux system.

Now that I search again, I can't find that page, which I had seen on
dev.chromium.org or on code.google.com/p/chromium/. I may have
mistaken those with instructions for Chromium OS.

> OTOH: What do you mean with "require root to
> be installed"? How do you install root (ie. a user
> account)? And lastly, to my knowledge, there are
> NO Linux distributions out there, which lack a root
> account.

I mean "installation requires you to be root."

Yang

> Alexander
> --
> ↯ Keine Internetzensur in Deutschland! ↪ http://zensursula.net ↩ ↯
> ↯    Lifestream (Twitter, Blog, …) ↣ http://alexs77.soup.io/     ↯
> ↯ Chat (Jabber/Google Talk) ↣ a.s...@gmail.com , AIM: alexws77  ↯
>
> Sent from Winterthur, ZH, Switzerland

--
Yang Zhang
http://www.mit.edu/~y_z/

[Max Gerlach]

I know, that this discussion is almost three years old, but when I searched for a way to run Chromium on a Linux box without root access, it still came up top. An easy way to get prebuilt "stand-alone" binaries is this page:

http://chromium-updater.inknine.com/

Max

[Rand Strauss]

This web site no longer works - http://chromium-updater.inknine.com/

[Jennifer Cook]

Yang,

just throwing this out there, but your post, along with your name that i have seen a lot regarding my hacked devices, looks so much like what i was just downloading. not to mention all the things you mention....in all of your posts seem to be linking to me. if not, me sincere apologies. i have been under severe stress for a yer now and if you are one of them, gimme a break now. if not, help me....please.

[Marcos Jacoby]

I'm currently running Kubuntu 18.04 and a 2 or 3 years ago I run chromium snapshot downloaded directly from https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html?prefix=Linux_x64/

I download the chrome-linux.zip file, decompress it to my user folder that create a folder called chrome-linux.

In my desktop I put a link pointed to "home/user/chrome-linux/chrome" and set this link to be executable and that's all

Reggarding to packed files you be able to unpack then and put in a diferent path than the usual opt/google/chrome-unstable (in my case)