Installing Google Chrome in Ubuntu

The installation process is very simple. Open a terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and do the above:

1. The first step is to update the sources list. Enter this command:

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and add the above lines to the end of that file:


#Google Chrome
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main


2. Save the file and exit the program, and then add the GPG keys by running this command:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5

3. Now we need to update our system:

sudo apt-get update

4. For the end we need to install the Chrome browser:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

One thing that may look bad to you, is that Chrome uses its own blue theme which looks very ugly with Ubuntu’s earth colors. In case you want to change that, go to the options menu and select the GTK theme from the Personal Stuff tab.

As you may know there is a tool called e2fsck that checks hard disks for problems, but this will work best on an unmounted partition so I really wanted to force Ubuntu to check the disks on boot.

Anyway to do that there are two ways. The hard one that involves the use of the tune2fs command and the easy one which is this:

sudo touch /forcefsck

I know it is funny how easy are things some times

For the record I performed a boot benchmark with ext3 and ext4 and the results are kind of funny. With ext3 file system and ext3 drivers (/etc/fstab) my Toshiba satellite laptop booted in 54 seconds. With ext3 file system and ext4 drivers it took 47 seconds and with ext4 drivers and file system 48 sec!

I know it sounds funny but – according to the documentation – converting your file system to ext4 wont affect the files already present in the disk, but only the files that are going to be written later. So I will have to wait for a kernel update in order to check it again

Since Hardy Heron Transmission is the default bit torrent client for Ubuntu, but at least in the Intrepid release the package is outdated as the 1.34 release is used. While I write this the 1.51 is the latest stable release which is included in the Jaunty Jackalope repositories.

Keeping transmission to the latest stable version

If you want to use the new features of Transmission in your pre Jaunty Ubuntu here is what you have to do. First of all we need to add the new repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. This will tell Ubuntu to look for newer versions of software we have installed there too.

1) To do so we need to open a terminal (Applications-> accesories-> terminal) and give the above command:

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

2) Now add in the end of the text the above lines and save it:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/transmissionbt/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/transmissionbt/ubuntu intrepid main

If you are using Hardy Heron replace intrepid with hardy, or if you are using 9.04 replace it with jaunty.

3) In the terminal give the above commands:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 976b5901365c5ca1
gpg --export --armor 976b5901365c5ca1 | sudo apt-key add -

4) We are almost done. Give this last set of commands in your terminal and your transmission will be upgraded to the latest stable release:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Now we are done. If you are asking yourself if that actually worths the effort, I can assure you that trasmission 1.51 is much better than the 1.34 that Ubuntu 8.10 has and I think that it is also much faster too.