For some time now I was using binary chrome files, as distributed by chromium web site. I tried building chrome from the source, but its requirements (a few GBs of free disk space + lots of time to compile everything) made me gave up from the idea. Instead, I wrapped up a simple script+spec file to convert binary chromium distribution to a mandriva RPM.

Please note that it is NOT the right way to do it, and it is in fact a big big hack – I simply grab the binary .zip from chromium site, repackage it as rpm, and define some rpm hacks to work around different shared library names. But it works fine for me (on i586), so I decided to share it in case someone else could be interested.

To install it with urpmi, the following would do the trick:

urpmi.addmedia --mirrorlist http://eugeni.dodonov.net/rpm eugeni i586
urpmi chrome

this will install the browser startup script in /usr/bin/chrome, and also add an entry to the menu. Please note that this is a dirty hack :) , but it makes it a bit easier to test new chromium packages without lots of manual tricks.