Tired of the slowness of Mozilla Firefox and curious with the acclaimed performance of Google Chrome (or Chromium, if you prefer), today I’ve decided to give it a try.

Although it is still an alpha version it already allows you to perform the regular navigation activities that you are used to with an incredible speed.

It’s layout is also a bit different of what we are used to, in my opinion it is great, KISS principle all the way.  I also like the new functionalities like the task manager which allows you to take control over the used memory with each tab/window and the browser itself.

With all this in mind I expect a great browser to arise from Google in the next months. Below are the steps that I needed to perform to install Chromium on Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid).

First of all you need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

$ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following two lines at the bottom of the file:

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

Now save/close the file and add the GPG key using the following command:

--rev-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5

Next we will update the source list and install the browser:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

If you want you can also enable flash support by copying (or linking) your previously installed flash library into browser plugins directory:

$ sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins

And you are done, next time you run it you will only need to specify the plugins usage with following command:

$ chromium-browser --enable-plugins