How I made a Portable Chromium

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jrb
Posts: 1536
Joined: Tue 11 Dec 2007, 19:56
Location: Smithers, BC, Canada

How I made a Portable Chromium

#1 Post by jrb »

First I downloaded Peebee's chromium.sfs, 75Mb to the drive my Bionic32-light is installed on. He's really good about keeping these up to date. This one is version 74.0.3729.108.

Next I extracted using UExtract. Went into the extracted folder, moved /usr/lib/chromium to the drive, in this case /mnt/sdc1/chromium.

Then I renamed the extracted folder to chromium-install, went inside and created /root/Startup. I wrote a new script, chromium_link, which contained:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
rm -fr /usr/lib/chromium
ln -s /initrd/mnt/dev_save/chromium /usr/lib/chromium
Since the chromium folder is on the same drive as my Puppy I was able to use /initrd/mnt/dev_save/chromium, but this only works if you have already saved Puppy. There are alternate ways to do this that are more versatile, but I will keep it simple for now.

Next I used dir2sfs to resquash the chromium-install folder:

Code: Select all

dir2sfs /mnt/sdc1/chromium
giving me chromium-install_19.03.sfs, which I renamed to chromium-install.sfs. 336Kb

Now use Menu->System->Boot Manager->SFS-packages to tell Puppy to load chromium-install.sfs at bootup. "Chromium Web Browser" should appear on the Internet menu.

I've gone from using 256.9Mb of ram loading the original chromium.sfs to using 1.37Mb with the chromium-install.sfs :D

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RetroTechGuy
Posts: 2947
Joined: Tue 15 Dec 2009, 17:20
Location: USA

Re: How I made a Portable Chromium

#2 Post by RetroTechGuy »

jrb wrote:I've gone from using 256.9Mb of ram loading the original chromium.sfs to using 1.37Mb with the chromium-install.sfs :D
Ahhh...unbloated browsers, what an amazing concept (whose idea was it to make the browser consume all available computer resources?).
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Mike Walsh
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Joined: Sat 28 Jun 2014, 12:42
Location: King's Lynn, UK.

#3 Post by Mike Walsh »

@ jrb:-

Nice one.

I believe this is another implementation of what davids45 & myself have been doing for some time now. We both use an external data partition, with a complete Linux 'file-system' set-up on it. Anything we want to share between Pups, we set all the appropriate bits up in the appropriate directories, then sym-link everything across to each Pup in the same directories, etc.....because that's where each Pup will expect to find them.

Cuts down enormously on storage space used when sharing large packages between several Pups, and I guess it's a variation on 'portability', too!

It's perhaps a wee bit cumbersome to initially set-up, though I did discover it's perfectly possible to create .pet or SFS packages containing nothing but sym-links. These can then be used for 'adding' an app to another Puppy.....

I used this method for a long while to 'share', 'remotely', a single instance of the final 32-bit package of Google Chrome between around a dozen Pups. I now do the same with Iron 69 in newer Pups; this version will play NetFlix flawlessly.....newer versions refuse to totally. Iron's my favourite Chrome replacement for newer, 32-bit Pups.....Chromium's all 'bleeding-edge', and wants the very newest of everything before it'll condescend to run.

Mike. :wink:

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nic007
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Joined: Sun 13 Nov 2011, 12:31
Location: Cradle of Humankind

#4 Post by nic007 »

I probably do the same although all my puppy files are on the same partition. This is actually easily achieved when using sfs-addons. I have frugal installs of puppy, each puppy in its own folder. Now, the same version of Palemoon runs on all puppys so I only have one Palemoon sfs in one of the puppy folders and symlink that to the other puppys in there respective folders.

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