Opera

Opera OLPC Edition

Opera has made a special Opera OLPC Edition package. Packages are available here.

Installing Opera

Installing Opera on test machines is easy. From a shell, run these commands as root:

wget http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/olpc-544/opera-9.12-20070122.10-static-qt.i386-en.rpm
rpm -vi opera-9.10-20061214.1-static-qt.i386-en.rpm

This installs the OLPC Edition, a snapshot of version 9.12. To learn about the most recent builds of Opera, check the Opera desktop blog and select the statically linked rpm packages for Unix/intel-linux.

If you are having trouble with rpm, just grab a tarball

wget http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/olpc-544/opera-9.12-20070122.10-static-qt.i386-en-544.tar.bz2
tar xvf opera-9.12-20070122.10-static-qt.i386-en-544.tar.bz2
cd opera-9.12-20070122.10-static-qt.i386-en-544
sudo ./install.sh

Opera is more than a secure web browser, it's also an RSS and Atom feed reader, bittorrent client, email client, and IRC client.

Opera offers keyboard shortcuts that may come handy:

• q/a navigates up/down in links
• w/s navigates up/down in headings
• 9/0 zooms page out/in

Executing Opera inside X-Windows (Sugar):

• Shell outside X (ctrl+alt+F1, ctrl+alt+F2, ...):
  • As root, set an environment variable:
    • export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0
  • Execute the opera with the user olpc:
    • su olpc -c "opera &"
• Throught a shell in X (alt+=):
  • just type opera from the shell

Installing Flash in Opera

• Download the flash plugin rpm file from http://www.adobe.com and install it: rpm -vi flash-plugin.XXXXX.rpm

Installing Java in Opera

• Download the JRE from http://java.sun.com and install it
• Then you need to create a symbolic link in opera plugin directory
  • cd /usr/lib/opera/plugins
  • ln -s /path/to/javajre/lib/i386

Known problems

• Running certain scripts inside Opera causes the machine to freeze. To avoid this, you can turn off JavaScript in the (quick) preferences (keybinding F12). Here is a minimal test case that exposes the problem:

<script type="text/javascript">
 var d = new Date()
 d.getMilliseconds()
 document.write(d)
</script>

The static version is compiled with gcc 2.95 (check opera --full-version). The Opera OLPC Edition build, made with gcc 4.1, is not affected by this.

• Fullscreen isn't quite fullscreen, there's a gray bar at the bottom - works fine when running without menubar.
• Widgets are not yet usable
• Opera is not integrated into the Sugar UI
• Due to the high pixel density, one "px" should probably be mapped to two pixels. Opera currently does not do this (what about the zoom feature? you could set default zoom to 200% in prefs). It helps to set opera:config#UserPrefs|ForceDPI to 200 and restart Opera, this will change fonts in the UI that are not previously set explicitly, as well as fonts in websites that are set with points.