How to run a Chromium "snapshot" build on Fedora 15

First, a little background: although Chromium is kindly packaged by Tom Callaway (a maintainer of a LOT of Fedora packages), when I installed it I had several problems occur. Instead I decided to try running a Chromium snapshot and it seemed simple enough:

Download the latest snapshot build (in Zip file)

1. Unzip it to ~/bin


2. Run the chrome binary contained

When I tried this, though, it complained that it couldn't load a BZip2 library. Chromium was looking for the library by a different name so I created a symlink in /lib64:

ln -s libbz2.so.1.0.6 libbz2.so.1.0

 

WARNING - WARNING - WARNING: Although the next step(s) won't harm your system I have worked out a better method of getting "Open with..." functionality working for Chromium. I will update this post with those details when I have time.

My next problem was that when I tried to use the "Open with..." functionality anywhere, a new instance of Chromium was started with a separate window and it complained that it couldn't access my profile. I guess it didn't like two instances running at the same time. As an ugly hack I installed the packaged version of Chromium, then:

1. Renamed /bin/chromium-browser to chromium-browser.OLD


2. Created a symlink /bin/chromium-browser to ~/bin/chrome-linux/chrome

So far everything's working as I want it to but only time will tell if I have been successful. In the future I expect I'll revert to the packaged version but for now this method is without errors and that's what I need.