Opera

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

wget ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/910/final/en/i386/static/opera-9.10-20061214.1-static-qt.i386-en.rpm
rpm -vi opera-9.10-20061214.1-static-qt.i386-en.rpm

This installs version 9.10. 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 ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/910/final/en/i386/static/opera-9.10-20061214.1-static-qt.i386-en.tar.bz2
tar xvf opera-9.10-20070112.1-static-qt.i386-en-536.tar.bz2
cd opera-9.10-20070112.1-static-qt.i386-en-536
sudo ./install.sh

and the defaults are ok.

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+shift+F11):
  • just type opera from there

Installing Flash in Opera

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

Installing Java in Opera

• Download the JRE from 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). A special (internal) static 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. 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.