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
There are two parts to installing Opera on the XO:
- install the "Opera RPM"; this step is required.
- install the "Opera activity"; this step is optional.
Installing the Opera RPM
Before you begin, make sure you are connected to the Internet!
Then from the Terminal activity 
:
1. Download and install Opera by typing the following rpm commands (You need "root" privileges, hence the "su -" command):
su - rpm -vi http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/olpc-544/opera-9.12-20070122.10-static-qt.i386-en.rpm exit
If you see an error message such as:
error: skipping http://... - transfer failed - Unknown or unexpected error
chances are you are either not connected to the Internet or you made a typo.
If you see an error message such as:
error: can't create transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/...
you probably forgot to "su" before the "rpm" command.
2. Make sure to exit the root process:
exit
3. Run Opera by typing:
opera
You exit Opera by going to the Home view (
) and clicking on the Stop entry in the hover menu over the gray circle that appears in the Activity circle.
You can follow the instructions below to install Opera as a Sugar activity or run it from the Terminal activity as per above.
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 su - ./install.sh exit
Installing the Opera activity
The Opera activity is not yet packaged as an XO bundle, so the installation process is a bit more complicated than we'd like.
In order for Opera to appear in the list of activities on the Frame taskbar, an extra set of files must be installed. Again, be sure your Internet connection is working; from the Terminal activity :
1. create the directory /home/olpc/Activities
mkdir /home/olpc/Activities
If the directory already exists, you may get an error message, which you can ignore:
mkdir: cannot create directory 'Activities': File exists
2. go to /home/olpc/Activities
cd /home/olpc/Activities
3. download the Opera activity
wget http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/olpc/opera-activity.tar.gz
You may see similar error messages as described above, for similar reasons.
4. install the Opera activity
tar xvzf opera-activity.tar.gz
5. clean up
rm opera-activity.tar.gz
In order for the change to take effect, restart Sugar (Ctrl+Alt+erase). You should see the Opera icon on the taskbar (you may have to scroll to the right in order to find it).
Note: There is at present an incompatibility between the Opera activity and the OLPC Rainbow security system on some builds. If when you launch the Opera activity, the screen goes blank and stays blank, you have likely encountered that incompatibility. The current work-around is to launch Opera from the Terminal activity by typing:
opera
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
Handheld Mode
To browse effectively with the OLPC in handheld mode, you'll need to configure some shortcuts manually. Click the "O" icon in the top-left corner of the Opera interface, then select "Tools>Preferences". From there, go to the "Advanced" tab and select "Shortcuts" in the pane on the left. Click the "Edit" button in the bottom set of buttons to edit your keyboard shortcuts. Now add the following mappings using the "New" button at the right:
- Left -> Back
- Right -> Open Link
Then use the search box to find the following keys (words on the left of the arrows), and the "Edit" button to alter their existing mappings to look like this:
- PageUp -> Navigate Up
- PageDown -> Navigate Down
- Home -> Navigate Left
- End -> Navigate Right
The end result of this is that the up and down arrows on the directional pad scroll up and down, the buttons on the gamepad spatially select links on a page (try it to see what that means), the right arrow "clicks" the selected link, and the left arrow goes back one page.
If you have low vision then you may also like:
- Home -> Zoom in, 15
- End -> Zoom out, 15
which will allow you to use the horizontal gamepad keys to adjust the page's zoom. (Change the number 15 to change tho coarseness of the zoom.) In newer versions, after pressing the Edit button you may have to click on the "Advanced" section and then the "Browser widget" section and edit the existing Home and End entries, otherwise these browser widget entries will override any entries that you add to the main section.
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; or simply stop it using the stop option from the hover menu on the Activity circle in the Home view.
- There is at present an incompatibility between the Opera activity and the OLPC Rainbow security system on some builds. If when you launch the Opera activity, the screen goes blank and stays blank, you have likely encountered that incompatibility.
- 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.
- The Chat (IRC) tool doesn`t seem to work when connecting to irc.freenode.net.
- Interface menu font is too small to be readily usable
- Setting the Interface menu font (Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Fonts -> Interface menus) causes menu text to become unreadable
Third-party (plug-ins and Java)
Installing Flash in Opera
- Follow the instructions at Adobe Flash.
Installing Java in Opera
- Download the JRE from http://java.sun.com and install it
- Note that jre1.5.0_13 has been know to work, while jre-6u3 does not work on the XO
- 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)