Opera without Sugar

THIS PAGE IS OBSOLETE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you want to use your XO for surfing only, you can run the Opera browser without Sugar. This page describes how to disable Sugar and how to install Opera. If you follow these steps, you will not be able to run the other OLPC activities. You will, however, be able to run other X applications in addition to Opera.

Remove Sugar

To prevent Sugar from starting up, edit /etc/inittab (as root) and comment out this line by adding '#' at the beginning:

x:5:respawn:/usr/sbin/olpc-dm

The line should therefore be:

#x:5:respawn:/usr/sbin/olpc-dm

The machine must be rebooted for the change to take effect. To revert the machine back to normal, remove the '#' and reboot.

Restart network

When the machine is rebooted with the modified /etc/inittab, Sugar will not be started. Instead, you will see a black screen. (If you don't see a black screen, try rebooting again by holding the power key for 3 seconds.) To get a login prompt, press ctrl-alt-f1 (f1 is the third key from the left in the upper row of keys). Login as root, no password is required.

The network must be restarted manually.

For example, these commands will open a connection through an open access point with SSID foo:

/sbin/service NetworkManager stop
/sbin/service network stop
/sbin/iwconfig eth0 essid foo
/sbin/dhclient -1 eth0

After having restarted the network, you may want to login to the XO unit through SSH. To do so, first set a password for root:

$ passwd

Then you can login from another machine with a command like:

$ ssh root@10.0.0.101

The IP number to use is reported by the /sbin/dhclient command above.

Download Opera

Now you should download an RPM file with Opera. For example:

wget http://get.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/950/final/en/i386/static/opera-9.50.gcc4-static-qt3.i386.rpm

and install it:

rpm -iv opera-9.50.gcc4-static-qt3.i386.rpm

To download and install Flash 10, you can do this:

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.i386.rpm
rpm -iv flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.i386.rpm

Edit .xinitrc

To start Opera automatically when the X server is started, edit /root/.xinitrc in the home directory. The file can e.g. look like:

opera -geometry 1200x900+0+0 &
xsetroot -gray &
xterm -geometry 80x50+494+51 &
xmodmap ~/.xmodmap
twm

You can download this and other configuration files from [1], see below.

Start the X server

This command will start the X server and the applications listed in the .xinitrc file:

$ startx

Configuration files

To map keys into sensible positions for the XO, you can download a set of configuration files:

cd /root
wget http://people.opera.com/howcome/2008/olpc/opera-without-sugar.tar.gz
tar xvzf opera-without-sugar.tar.gz

The files are: .xinitrc, .twmrc, .xmodmap, olpc-keyboard.ini

Opera must be told about the last of these. Start opera and go to this address:

opera:config

Search for "keyboard" and give the location of the file as value

/root/olpc-keyboard-ini

By extracting these files, you achieve the following new mappings:

magnifier key: view HTML source code
F2: cycle to the left tab
F3: cycle to the right tab
F5-F8: select zoom level
F9: backlight off
F10: backlight on
windows key: bring lowermost X window to front
rectangle key: focus on address bar to open new URL
wheel up: page up
wheen down: page down
circle game button: new tab
v game button: zoom in
x game button: delete tab
square game button: zoom out

These new mappings come in additions to the many key mappings found in Opera.

Performance

To increase performance, Opera should probably be configured to run without disk caching. To turn it off, select

Tools->Preferences->Advanced->History and set Disk Cache to off.

Due to the high pixel density of the XO, you may want to set the zoom level to 150%.

View->zoom->150%