My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Chromium: the answer to life, the universe and everything

Chromium and Widevine:

chromium_iconGeeks and Sci-Fi fans, as well as otherwise properly educated people, will recognize the blog title for what it is.

Chrome 42 is released. Big jump: a major version change. Mostly changes under the hood again it seems. The Chrome binaries for this version contain a new version of the PepperFlash plugin, which I have extracted for use with the chromium browser – see my earlier blog. The packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are available for download so that you can enjoy the latest Chromium browser (and its optional Widevine plugin) in your trustworthy Slackware environment.

In the  Chrome Releases blog you can read the announcement for Chrome/Chromium 42 to the Stable Channel (full version is 42.0.2311.90).

The new packages for my chromium and chromium-widevine-plugin packages both have version 42.0.2311.90 – indicating that they should be used together. The Widevine plugin reports itself as version “1.4.7.796” in chrome://plugins – same version as in my chromium-dev 43 package.

You don’t have to install the Widevine plugin. Chromium without Widevine plugin is a pure and open source browser, even the Widevine “adapter module” inside the Chromium package is open source. The Widevine library itself is a closed-source Content Decryption Module (CDM) which therefore is not part of the Chromium package but separately packaged (after extracting it from Google’s binary download of the Chrome browser with the same version number). You would typically want to install the plugin if you have a Netflix subscription and want to watch your movies in a Chromium browser.

Download locations:

Have fun! Next on the blog: new packages for VLC, the VideoLAN media player!

Eric

10 Comments

  1. gauchao

    Wasn’t it 42?

  2. gauchao

    Er.. now I saw it…

  3. Didier Spaier

    And after all that hard work we still don’t know what was the question…

  4. alienbob

    The question of course, has always been and still is “What is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”…!

  5. Marcelo

    And the Firefox 37 ? =/
    Tks! for all

  6. alienbob

    Firefox is part of Slackware, I don’t touch it. I only build chromium because it has features firefox does not have.

  7. Mike Langdon (mlangdn)

    Thanks!

  8. p431i7o

    Thanks Eric!! Hours of compilations avoided, thanks to you…

    Chromium is very important to me, as a Web developer, is always good to have the last browser available to test things…

  9. Balwinder S Dheeman

    IMHO, both the google-chrome and chromium have reached a state, where I may categorize them as bloatware; I hate the page rendering by webkit and the browsers are not faster than Firefox anymore 🙁

  10. wut

    Could you make a ppa so I can install it via terminal? 🙂

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