Opera

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Revision as of 17:24, 23 January 2007 by Csant (talk | contribs) (Updating to latest "Opera OLPC" version)
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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 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). 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. 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.