Opera without Sugar

If you want to use your XO for surfing, you can use the Opera browser without having to run Sugar.

Remove Sugar

To prevent Sugar from starting up, edit /etc/inittab 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

Restart network

When Sugar is not running, the network must be restarted manually.

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

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

Download Opera

Download RPM 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 (as root):

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

Edit .xinitrc

To start Opera automatically when the X server is started, edit .xinitrc in the home directory. The file should contain only one line:

opera

Alternatively, if you would like a simple window manager, the .xinitrc file should be:

opera &
twm

Start the X server

startx

Configure Opera

To increase performance, Opera should 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%