Porting Chromium to FreeBSD

Ben Laurie has started porting Chromium (the open source project behind the Google Chrome browser) to FreeBSD.

In my copious spare time, I’ve started work on a FreeBSD port of Chromium. So far it doesn’t even build, but I’ve identified a few problem areas people might like to pitch in on.

• NSS port: the FreeBSD NSS port needs to be upgraded to at least NSS 3.12. Ideally to the latest version because it fixes some security holes.
• Sound: mostly whatever Linux does it likely to be the right thing for FreeBSD, too, so much of the porting work at this stage is pretty mechanical. But sound isn’t – the Linux port uses ALSA, which FreeBSD has no truck with. I am informed that the right thing to use on FreeBSD is OSS. But someone needs to do that.
• Build farm: building this sucker is slow. I wouldn’t mind having access to a nice big build farm.

So far none of the work has been committed, but I am optimistic that some will be soon. In the meantime, you’ll be needing some patches. (source)

Google Chrome can already be run with Wine on FreeBSD (winehq – howto) but a native version would be better, obviously