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I wanted to install Chromium "out of tree" on Ubuntu 14.04, and I found Where can I find Chromium binary tarballs? - so I tried:

wget http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Linux/382086/chrome-linux.zip -O chrome-linux-382086.zip
unzip chrome-linux-382086.zip
mv chrome-linux chrome-linux-382086
cd chrome-linux-382086

This turned out to be Chromium version 51.0.2684.0.

After some failures, I figured that the command line to start it up is:

CHROME_DEVEL_SANDBOX=$PWD/chrome_sandbox ./chrome-wrapper --incognito --extra-plugins-dir=/usr/lib/flashplugin-installer --extra-plugins-dir=/usr/lib/pipelight

... and it starts up fine, but chrome://plugins shows only two plugins, and Flash is not one of them. I've tried using --extra-plugins-dir to no avail (those dirs are from previous apt-get installs to get the plugin for Firefox).

Then I wanted to know where does Chromium look for plugins; for extensions, it is clear (see Where are chromium extensions located?) but for plugins, the clearest explanation I could find is this:

22261 - Load plugins from ~/.config/$PRODUCT_NAME/plugins - chromium - Monorail

Plugin loading already scans a scrillion directories so one more probably is ok.
linux: also load plugins from ~/.config/google-chrome/Plugins

So my first question is:

  • Is there a simple reference for which exact of these "scrillion" directories are scanned by chromium for plugins? Is there maybe a "verbose" switch for chromium, that would output what directories are scanned for plugins when the Chromium application starts up?

So, I first created Plugins folder in ~/.config/chromium/

After seeing Adobe Flash isn't working - Chrome Help, I downloaded, as mentioned there, flash_player_ppapi_linux.i386.tar.gz from http://www.adobe.com/go/chrome/ - unpacked the zip, got libpepflashplayer.so. Then I trying symlinking libpepflashplayer.so in both the chrome-linux-382086 directory, and in ~/.config/chromium/Plugins, nothing worked (i.e. no new plugin was shown in chrome://plugins/).

So my second question is:

  • How do I "install", or rather, make available, the Flash plugin for this kind of Chromium (i.e. chromium build, unzipped out of the main root tree which the OS package system uses)? Which .so file do I need, and where do I need to symlink (or copy) it - and should I use some special command option for the plugin to load, when running chrome-wrapper or chrome?

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Well, didn't expect this, but I found an answer:

List of Chromium Command Line Switches « Peter Beverloo

--ppapi-flash-path      Use the PPAPI (Pepper) Flash found at the given path.

So, since I unpacked flash_player_ppapi_linux.i386.tar.gz in a directory called flash_player_ppapi_linux.i386 inside the chrome-linux-382086 (that is, the plagin is at chrome-linux-382086/flash_player_ppapi_linux.i386/libpepflashplayer.so), I used this command line:

chrome-linux-382086$ CHROME_DEVEL_SANDBOX=$PWD/chrome_sandbox ./chrome-wrapper --incognito --ppapi-flash-path=$PWD/flash_player_ppapi_linux.i386

... and now Flash is visible in chrome://plugins, and it even starts up and loads swf's ... However, from what I've seen, the flash plugin loaded like this doesn't seem to be able to make some network connections? However, for the most part it seems to work...

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