Canary Alternative for Ubuntu

A while back, I came across a tech-talk about Batarang.  According to the video, I had to have Canary because the tool depended on features that were not available in the stable release of Chrome.  To spoil the story, Batarang is now available via the Chrome Store and works fine on Chrome.  But, this is my story on searching for Canary for Linux.

What I found was that Canary was not feasible on Linux.  The best alternative was to install the “daily” release of Chromium.  Because I use Chrome as my day-to-day browser, Chromium works great as a development browser.  They can exist side by side without conflicting.

The Chromium-Daily Repository

My first attempt was to use this chromium-daily repository.  I’ll save you some time: it’s out of date.  Skip on down to the next section.  The only reason that I included this is to point out that it would be great if someone could pick it up to make it active again.

Here’s the install instructions to add the repository and install the browser:

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

I get these error messages:


W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found

E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

To remove the PPA, I used this:

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*chromium*

Chromium Continuous Build Website

So, I found this website:  Chromium Continuous Build.  It apparently keeps a daily build out there.  I just had to download it and unzip it on my drive.

I created a directory to put it in (~/bin/chromium).  Then, I wrote this script to download the latest version:


#!/bin/sh

wget http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-continuous/Linux_x64/LAST_CHANGE
LAST_BUILD_ID=`cat LAST_CHANGE`
echo "Last Update ID: $LAST_BUILD_ID"
wget http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-continuous/Linux_x64/$LAST_BUILD_ID/chrome-linux.zip
unzip chrome-linux.zip

Then, I ran the chrome binary.  This is the version it downloaded:

The cool part is that it is separate from my main chrome browser because it is chromium, and my main browser is chrome.

Batarang

To download the Batarang extension, I ran this:

git clone git://github.com/angular/angularjs-batarang

After it was downloaded, I went to Chrome Extensions:

chrome://chrome/extensions/

Then, I checked the Developer Mode:

Selection_582

Next, I clicked Load Unpacked Extension:

I chose the directory:

That installed the extension.  I went to my site with Angular installed.  I used Ctrl+Shift+J to open the console.  And, there it was:

Resources

One thought on “Canary Alternative for Ubuntu

  1. I’m running Ubuntu 13.10 x64 and ran into a couple of issues. Here’s what it took to get the Chromium daily to run:

    cd /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
    sudo ln -s libudev.so.1 libudev.so.0
    cd ~/bin/chromium/chrome-linux
    sudo cp chrome_sandbox /usr/local/sbin/chrome-devel-sandbox
    sudo chown root:root /usr/local/sbin/chrome-devel-sandbox
    sudo chmod 4755 /usr/local/sbin/chrome-devel-sandbox
    export CHROME_DEVEL_SANDBOX=/usr/local/sbin/chrome-devel-sandbox

    I also added the export line to the end of ~/.bashrc and a symlink for easy calling:

    echo export CHROME_DEVEL_SANDBOX=/usr/local/sbin/chrome-devel-sandbox >> ~/.bashrc
    ln -s ~/bin/chromium/chrome-linux/chrome ~/bin/canary

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