This page describes system requirements for building Chromium on Linux.

• System Requirements
• Linux distribution
• Disk space
• Memory space
• 64-bit Systems
• Software Requirements
• Automated Setup
• Distribution-specific Notes
• Ubuntu Setup
• Debian Setup
• openSUSE Setup
• Fedora Setup
• Arch Linux Setup
• Mandriva setup
• Gentoo setup

System Requirements

Linux distribution

You should be able to build Chromium on any reasonably modern Linux distribution, but there are a lot of distributions and we sometimes break things on one or another. Internally, our development platform has been a variant of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx); we expect you will have the most luck on this platform, although directions for other popular platforms are included below.

Disk space

It takes about 10GB or so of disk space to check out and build the source tree. This number grows over time.

Memory space

It takes about 8GB of swap file to link chromium and its tests. If you get an out-of-memory error during the final link, you will need to add swap space with swapon. It's recommended to have at least 4GB of memory available for building a statically linked debug build. Dynamic linking and/or building a release build lowers memory requirements. People with less than 8GB of memory may want to not build tests since they are quite large.

64-bit Systems

Chromium can be compiled as either a 32-bit or 64-bit application. Chromium requires several system libraries to compile and run. While it is possible to compile and run a 32-bit Chromium on 64-bit Linux, many distributions are missing the necessary 32-bit libraries, and will result in build or run-time errors.

Software Requirements

Building on Linux requires software not usually installed with the distributions.

Automated Setup

The script build/install-build-deps.sh (at least for Ubuntu) attempts to automate installing the required software. This script is used to set up the canonical builders, and as such is the most up to date reference for the required prerequisites.

Please update that script if you find it's incomplete.

(TODO: make this Linux-distribution independent)

This is an approximation of the requirements it verifies and/or installs.

• Linux kernel >= 2.6.16
• Python >= 2.4
• python2.5-dev
• Perl >= 5.x
• gcc/g++ >= 4.2
• g++-multilib >=4.2
• bison >= 2.3
• flex >= 2.5.34
• gperf >= 3.0.4
• pkg-config >= 0.20
• libnss3-dev >= 3.12
• libasound2-dev
• libgconf2-dev
• libglib2.0-dev
• libgnome-keyring-dev
• libgtk2.0-dev
• libnspr4-0d >= 4.7.1+1.9-0ubuntu0.8.04.5 (ubuntu0.8.04.1 causes duplicate dtoa references)
• libnspr4-dev >= 4.7.1+1.9-0ubuntu0.8.04.5
• freetype-dev
• libcairo2-dev
• libcupsys2-dev
• libdbus-1-dev
• libbz2-dev
• libjpeg62-dev
• libpam0g-dev
• libexpat-dev
• libbzip2-dev
• mesa-common-dev
• libgl1-mesa-dev
• libglu1-mesa-dev
• libxss-dev
• libxtst-dev
• libcurl4-gnutls-dev
• libcupsys2-dev
• libelf-dev

Currently used by basic tests (in order to run swig):

• libc6-i386
• lib32stdc++6

Optional (currently, all of these are only used by layout tests):

• apache2
• libapache2-mod-php5
• wdiff
• msttcorefonts (Microsoft fonts)
• lighttpd
• php5-cgi
• sun-java6-fonts (needed for Lucida-- you probably need to add the 'partner' repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list)
• ttf-dejavu-core
• ttf-kochi-gothic
• ttf-kochi-mincho

NOTE: We currently want to support distributions that are as old as Ubuntu Hardy, so for example, we don't want to use features from newer versions that are not present in gtk 2.12.9 (the Hardy version).

Distribution-specific Notes

Ubuntu Setup

On a 32-bit Ubuntu 8.04, you can fetch all of the above as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install bison fakeroot flex g++ g++-multilib gperf \
  libapache2-mod-php5 libasound2-dev libbz2-dev libcairo2-dev \
  libdbus-glib-1-dev libgconf2-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev \
  libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libjpeg62-dev libnspr4-dev libnss3-dev \
  libpam0g-dev libsqlite3-dev libxslt1-dev libxss-dev \
  mesa-common-dev msttcorefonts patch perl pkg-config python \
  python2.5-dev rpm subversion libcupsys2-dev libgnome-keyring-dev \
  libcurl4-gnutls-dev libelf-dev libc6-i386 lib32stdc++6

There are some optional extra packages that are only necessary to run tests. For example, sun-java6-fonts includes one font (along with a hefty JRE) that is used by a WebKit test.

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 wdiff lighttpd php5-cgi sun-java6-fonts \
   msttcorefonts ttf-dejavu-core ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-kochi-mincho

On Lucid I also needed these fonts for layout tests:

$ sudo apt-get install ttf-indic-fonts

Debian Setup

Follow the Ubuntu instructions above.

If you want to install the build-deps manually, note that the original packages are for Ubuntu. Here are the Debian equivalents:

• libexpat-dev -> libexpat1-dev
• freetype-dev -> libfreetype6-dev
• libbzip2-dev -> libbz2-dev

openSUSE Setup

For openSUSE 11.0 and later, see Linux openSUSE Build Instructions.

Fedora Setup

Recent systems:

su -c 'yum install subversion pkgconfig python perl gcc-c++ bison \
flex gperf nss-devel nspr-devel gtk2-devel glib2-devel freetype-devel \
atk-devel pango-devel cairo-devel fontconfig-devel GConf2-devel \
dbus-devel alsa-lib-devel libX11-devel expat-devel bzip2-devel \
dbus-glib-devel elfutils-libelf-devel libjpeg-devel \
mesa-libGLU-devel libXScrnSaver-devel \
libgnome-keyring-devel cups-devel libXtst-devel libXt-devel pam-devel'

The msttcorefonts packages can be obtained by following the instructions present here: http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installfonts

For the optional packages:

• php-cgi is provided by the php-cli package
• wdiff doesn't exist in Fedora repositories, a possible alternative would be dwdiff
• sun-java6-fonts doesn't exist in Fedora repositories, needs investigating

su -c 'yum install lighttpd php-cli dwdiff'

Arch Linux Setup

Most of these packages are probably already installed since they're often used, and the parameter --needed ensures that packages up to date are not reinstalled.

$ sudo pacman -S --needed python perl gcc gcc-libs bison flex gperf pkgconfig nss \
  alsa-lib gconf glib2 gtk2 nspr ttf-ms-fonts freetype2 cairo dbus \
  libgnome-keyring

For the optional packages on Arch Linux:

• php-cgi is provided with pacman
• wdiff is not in the main repository but dwdiff is. You can get wdiff in AUR/yaourt
• sun-java6-fonts do not seem to be in main repository or AUR.

For a successful build, add 'remove_webcore_debug_symbols': 1, to the variables-object in include.gypi. Tested on 64-bit Arch Linux.

TODO: Figure out how to make it build with the WebCore debug symbols. make V=1 can be useful for solving the problem.

Mandriva setup

urpmi lib64fontconfig-devel lib64alsa2-devel lib64dbus-1-devel lib64GConf2-devel \
lib64freetype6-devel lib64atk1.0-devel lib64gtk+2.0_0-devel lib64pango1.0-devel \
lib64cairo-devel lib64nss-devel lib64nspr-devel g++ python perl bison flex subversion \
gperf

Note 1: msttcorefonts are not available, you will need to build your own (see instructions, not hard to do, see http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/MandrivaMsttcorefonts ) or use drakfont to import the fonts from a windows installation

Note 2: these packages are for 64 bit, to download the 32 bit packages, substitute lib64 with lib

Note 3: some of these packages might not be explicitly necessary as they come as dependencies, there is no harm in including them however.

Note 4: to build on 64 bit systems use, instead of GYP_DEFINES=target_arch=x64 , as mentioned in the general notes for building on 64 bit:

export GYP_DEFINES="target_arch=x64"
gclient runhooks --force

Gentoo setup

emerge www-client/chromium