How to run Chromium v26 on Ubuntu

As you would know, since several months ago there's no official Chromium Nightly builds PPA, but since last week was enabled the support for native DataChannels on Chrome Canary (yeah!!! :-D ) I was decided to test it whatever it cost.

To do it, here we have two options: Canary versions only available for Windows, or hack a way to get to run a Nightly release on Linux. The Canary was fairly easy, just reboot on my dust-filled Windows partition, but to test and debug DataChannels-polyfill was a PITA thanks to Windows files protection idiosyncrasy so this morning I've managed to achieve the second method... and won :-D

First of all, we need to get a Nightly build. We can download or compile it by ourself, but I find fairly better to use this script that also makes a backup of previous versions, a command called chromium-cont to distinguish it from the stable one, and create a shortcut on the apps menu. Just a piece of cake. The problem here is that it's a vanilla compilation of Chromium, so it will try to use our default profile and if we have a previous version of Chromium running, it will just open a new window tab on it, so we'll need to launch it with a flag telling him a new folder where to store his config info. A good one would be ~/.config/chromium-cont, to be on pair with Chromium and Google Chrome config folders:

--user-data-dir=~/.config/chromium-cont

To do this just add the flag when launching from command line, or to add it to the shortcut right-click on the apps menu, select "Edit menus" and navigate up to "Internet > Chromium Updated" and set it there. Another option would be to just change the chromium-cont symlink to a full-fledged shell script that also pass automatically the selected config folder (more or less what Chrome Canary does) so it will be used everywhere is being launched, but I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader :-)

Finally, to enable native DataChannels on it you will have to add a --enable-data-channels flag when launching it, or better put on the browser navigation bar "about://flags", scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "Enable RTCDataChannel". Now you have a full fledged Chromium v26 ready to start experimenting with native DataChannels directly from Linux!!! :-D