Opera

Opera OLPC Edition

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

Opera is more than a secure web browser, it's also an RSS and Atom feed reader, bittorrent client, email client, and IRC client. It also has many keyboard shortcuts that make navigating on the XO easy.

Installing Opera

Installing Opera on test machines is easy (if you are an experienced Linux user—novices may find it somewhat challenging. An XO-bundled version that will install with one click would be desireable). From the Terminal activity:

1. start a root process:

su

2. use wget to download the activity:

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

3. install the activity using rpm:

rpm -vi opera-9.12-20070122.10-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, try grabbing 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

Adding an Opera activity

In order for Opera to appear in the list of activities in the GUI, an extra set of files must be installed. To download and install the files, run the following commands in a shell:

cd /usr/share/activities
wget http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/olpc/opera-activity.tar.gz
tar xvzf opera-activity.tar.gz

In order for the change to take effect, restart the X server (ctrl-alt-erase). The files have been tested in build 303.

The Opera activity files have been developed by the CERTI Foundation, a R&D foundation in Brazil that is testing the OLPC's XO for the Brazilian government. We are grateful to João Bosco A. Pereira Filho and Gustavo Maestri for their work on this.

Keyboard Shortcuts

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
• z/x navigates back/forward in history
• ctrl t open a new tab
• ctrl l focus and highlight the page url

Known problems

• Widgets are not yet usable
• Opera is not fully integrated into the Sugar UI. In particular, the Opera process does not die when the activity is terminated. In order to terminate Opera, open a shell and run a "kill" command.
• 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.

Third-party (plug-ins and Java)

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 (e.g., /usr/java/jrel.6.8/lib/i386)