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Opera OLPC Edition

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This is a special edition of the Opera desktop version - the Opera OLPC Edition.

We have been testing Opera on the OLPC laptop since we received the "lean-mean-green-machine", as some here at the office like to call it. I have been keeping both the Opera page on the OLPC Wiki as well as my own blog up-to-date about work on it. We feel the time to be ready to show you the progress we have made.

A few notes about this package:

This is (almost) a normal desktop build - so you can run it on any Linux box - but

…you really want to read this first, before installing it:

  • This is a build with statically linked Qt, as are our .1 builds - but the static builds are usually made with gcc 2.95 for compatibility reasons. However, this build is made with gcc 4.1 in order to avoid a nasty issue on the laptop: the builds made with gcc 2.95 kill the machine when you run some javascript. (This one doesn't wink so you can turn javascript back on, if you were running without).
  • The package ships with a custom opera6rc:
    ; Put any default settings here that are overridable by users
    
    [User Prefs]
    Force DPI=96
    Show Menu=0
    Minimum Font Size=12
    Show panel toggle=0
    Button Set=/usr/share/opera/skin/olpc_skin.zip
    Toolbar Configuration=/usr/share/opera/ini/olpc_toolbar.ini
    
    [Fonts]
    Toolbar=18,4,0,0,0,0,DejaVu LGC Sans [unknown]
    Panel=18,4,0,0,0,0,DejaVu LGC Sans [unknown]
    Dialog=18,4,0,0,0,0,DejaVu LGC Sans [unknown]

    If you install this package on some other Linux box than it was intended for, you might want to back up the original /etc/opera6rc first.
  • The package comes with a custom olpc_skin.zip and a custom olpc_toolbar.ini: when installing the package, they will be preselected by default. However, when running the package directly from the tarball without installing it, both the skin and toolbar will not be applied automatically. Also, there is a bug in the Preferences dialog that prevents Opera from detecting two toolbars in the default location. Since we decided to also ship the default toolbar, this will be the only one appearing in the toolbar section in the Preferences. If you select it, there is no way in the GUI to revert to the olpc_toolbar - you'll need to copy it from the default location /usr/share/opera/ini/olpc_toolbar.ini to your profile. Note that some icons in the skin are missing.
  • To install the build on the OLPC laptop you most likely want to grab the RPM package, then install it with
    rpm -i opera-9.12-20070122.10-static-qt.i386-en.rpm

    or the -U flag if you have installed Opera previously and you are now just upgrading.

    We have also uploaded tarballs and a DEB package for anybody running either some other distro on the machine, or for those that have problems to get the RPM to install. To install from the tarballs follow these instructions:
    $ tar jxvf 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


Note also that we have only tested on a BTest-1 machine with default system installation - other machines than this might have their own issues. This is not a final build, but a development snapshot.

And now for to the fun part: download your build, and play with it!

We would very much appreciate as much feedback as possible! How does Opera run on your OLPC XO? smile


Download
Opera OLPC Edition

OLPC skin

Help us help you!New weekly build

Comments

Tamil Tuesday, January 23, 2007 4:32:35 PM

Nice. up

YOKEYyokey Tuesday, January 23, 2007 4:42:42 PM

very Good special edition of the Opera desktop version

Eddie LopezEddie_Lopez Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:02:07 PM

I say the "special edition" should come with a signed photograph of the dev team.

www.nenelinux.tk ®nenericardo Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:22:01 PM

yeah great !!! bigsmile

Kamaleshkamalesh Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:22:30 PM

Great work on supporting an important project!

For those of us without "happy feet," great sleek OLPC skin! smile (May suggest you add some cool skinnable buttons, though, if possible -- that show in Gmail and others with skinnable page design.)

Ahui886 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:29:34 PM

i love opera forever!

great!

Kyle Bakerkyleabaker Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:05:44 PM

Wish I was running on unix to give this fresh special a test, haha. Congratz on the progress tho guys!

Cherry79 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:21:22 PM

You can test the toolbar and the skin on every system.
Actually, i don't like the skin very much. Don't know how it works on the OLPC, but on my Thinkpad its terrible. Much to dark, icons (and coming with this tabs) too big, and the white address- and zoom-boxes don't fit with the rest of the skin.
The idea is nice, and the buttons are cute, but it definitely isn't a skin i'd use for more than a short look.
And toolbar-setting doesn't really work here, too. I copied it to my profile-directory and then just selected the setting from Opera preferences. All it did was put the tabs below the browsing window and switch off everything else. Maybe its because i switched of many of the default toolbars in my personal toolbar.ini, i use only main-, status- and tab-bar. Which toolbars are supposed to be active with the OLPC-toolbar.ini?

Martin

Claudio Santambrogiocsant Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:36:16 PM

Martin, the OLPC laptop has 200 DPI - it looks *very* different on the device than on a normal desktop. Also the whole environment is very different and minimalistic, and the that toolbar is already "full-blown" when compared to the rest of the environment wink

The olpc_toolbar.ini is stuck somewhere in the system - when it's up I'll post a link in the post, so people can play with it. The skin really needs the custom toolbar to work.

XP1 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:37:40 PM

Tell people at OLPC to make Opera default browser. smile

XP1 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:44:40 PM

Will this become the next MultiTorg Opera that everyone wants? bigsmile

Cherry79 Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:47:05 PM

Yeah, i found the toolbar.ini, that was no big deal. But just changing from my toolbar.ini to olpc-toolbar.ini left me with nothing more than tabs. No address-bar, status-bar, address-field on any other bar, no menu... thats why i asked which toolbars should be enabled with olpc-skin and olpc-toolbar.ini
And i think i try the skin again with 50% icon-size, this should work better as my display has something like 85 dpi

Martin

Claudio Santambrogiocsant Tuesday, January 23, 2007 7:03:45 PM

Martin, the olpc_toolbar is how you get your toolbars on the OLPC. Anything else would be either too small, or taking up too much space. The setup does not really work on a normal desktop screen. But maybe somebody does manage to adapt it to his/her needs? smile

Kenneth Crudupkennycrudup Tuesday, January 23, 2007 7:03:58 PM

I dunno if this is a surprise, but the random rendering bug is here, too.

What's the biggest differences in the OLPC and the "regular" Operas?

Claudio Santambrogiocsant Tuesday, January 23, 2007 7:26:10 PM

Kennycrudup, the differences are listed in the post smile See a short summary here.

xcbxcbxcbxcbLontronics Tuesday, January 23, 2007 7:58:51 PM

I really hope this will become a new 'weekly-variant'.

This build seems to be about 10 percent faster then the normal static weekly, without loosing functionality; probably because it is build against GCC4.1.

Good work!

Jan

FataL Tuesday, January 23, 2007 8:35:07 PM

Nice! I digged this.

Kenneth Crudupkennycrudup Tuesday, January 23, 2007 8:43:36 PM

Heh. I've been running GCC 4.1.1/Qt 3.3.7 for a while now (while trying to track down my bug); I guess that's why I haven't noticed much difference. smile

Tommy A. Olsentoman Tuesday, January 23, 2007 9:25:30 PM

Duly posted on linux1.no smile

Andresandresruiz Tuesday, January 23, 2007 10:26:15 PM

Great

What other browsers are available for OLPCs ?

Romanfeil0ng Wednesday, January 24, 2007 12:06:11 AM

So we have an Opera OLPC Edition, Opera on mobiles, PDAs, Nintendo DS and Wii. Is there a chance for a native 64Bit version of Opera for my Debian Etch (almost stable)? Windows Vista 64 is also coming soon and 64 bit flash plugin work is ongoing (http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/01/non-beta-flash-player-9-for-linux.html)

Maybe from the Peregrine code branch ?

Edgar P. NashNetegrof Wednesday, January 24, 2007 1:20:01 AM

Congratulations for Opera Team. I think that Opera is the best browser in the world without none doubt, I only have one think to ask when will be include the NTLM authentication in Linux, some peoples don´t uses it for that reason.

RachidRachidNL Wednesday, January 24, 2007 8:15:09 AM

It's really great to see Opera actively supporting the OLPC project. I really hope it'll become the default browser. With only 200 DPI on a screen, there's no other browser than Opera that still can render pages in such a way that it'll actually make sense.

Surely the technical aspect is nice, but I'd be more interested in finding out what the exact role of the Opera Browser will be on the OLPC.

Is it going to be the sole browser on the system?

Pieter Van NuffelMuts Wednesday, January 24, 2007 11:48:26 AM

"Heh. I've been running GCC 4.1.1/Qt 3.3.7 for a while now (while trying to track down my bug); I guess that's why I haven't noticed much difference."

The fact that you run that Qt version is relevant, but the fact that you have GCC 4.1 is not. You see, that's the compiler the opera people seem to use to compile their internal sources to these binary programs we download and test.

If you yourself would be able to compile from the sources than it's usefull to have an up-to-date version of GCC.
Having a recent version installed on your system does not have any impact on runnning a program compiled with it. bigsmile

HieuRooy Wednesday, January 24, 2007 1:29:01 PM

RachidNL wrote:
"only 200 DPI"
Well, I guess 200 DPI doesn't fit together with 'only' ;-)

But, I read on some wiki site (either the project's wiki or Wikipedia), that 200 DPI is only available in bookmode, i.e. black&white low power for reading book. Color display has lower resolution.
Feel free to correct me.

Ruud Steltenpoolstelt Wednesday, January 24, 2007 3:39:37 PM

Does it do SVG, like most other Opera versions?

FataL Wednesday, January 24, 2007 4:34:27 PM

Does it do SVG, like most other Opera versions?

Why not? smile I'm shure it does.

Claudio Santambrogiocsant Wednesday, January 24, 2007 5:29:12 PM

Originally posted by stelt:

Does it do SVG?



Yes of course smile

Kamaleshkamalesh Wednesday, January 24, 2007 6:41:36 PM

Following on to fei_l0ng's question about 64-bit support.

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will go 64-bit (with 32-bit compatibility) when released around April/May. Any plans to offer 64-bit Mac build? smile

(I wonder if this would provide significant performance boost with a given bandwidth...?)

Kenneth Crudupkennycrudup Wednesday, January 24, 2007 9:12:18 PM

@Muts: you should know I'm a Dev too and build nearly everything (and nearly everything connected to Opera- X11, GLIBC, Qt, Freetype, yadda yadda yadda) from source.

Andresandresruiz Thursday, January 25, 2007 2:51:59 AM

@kyleabaker

Thank you for <browser.js> info.

YMB is working again !! cheers

Andresandresruiz Thursday, January 25, 2007 3:53:29 AM

A question:

Why on Gmail, I get in the address bar a <disablechatbrowsercheck=1>, is it done by Opera or by Gmail guys ?

((PERSONAL OPINION ))
I think that when Opera operates on "disable browser check" or "system requirements = ignore > web pages are not fixing problems with Opera, they just let Opera work "on your own" but they don't work for Opera as they do for IE or Firefox, so in that way Opera will never be as popular as the other two.

Johan Borgborg Thursday, January 25, 2007 7:38:22 AM

@kamalesh: We're working on 64bit support for future versions, but the main focus there is Linux (and friends) since Windows and Mac have transparent support for 32bit applications on 64bit systems. We don't expect large speed differences between the two versions.

Romanfeil0ng Thursday, January 25, 2007 4:14:44 PM

@borg
thank you for the answer. I guess there is no date besides the famous W.I.R
:-D

outofspace Friday, January 26, 2007 7:01:17 AM

M2 is needing a really kick for progress, don't forget about this!

Khaled KhalilKhaled-Khalil Friday, January 26, 2007 12:11:53 PM

it doesn't look nice on desktop (yes because ~twice dpi)
it doesn't support arabic (not presto of course ~may be just the skin)
the skin may be better for desktops, but it doesn't fit the need of the target audiance (the last character in olpc), it seems dosen't respect children innocence smile
i realy care of the skin specialy when it is for children, they always want bright colors, like olpc itself, yes it is customizable, but who know ? children that use it ? they will prefer using another browser instead of customize it

Claudio Santambrogiocsant Friday, January 26, 2007 5:00:24 PM

it doesn't support arabic



Could you be more precise, please? What exactly is not "supported"?

they always want bright colors



Well, like it or not - these are the colors of the XO UI smile We are just making sure to fit nicely into the system colors.

Khaled KhalilKhaled-Khalil Friday, January 26, 2007 5:48:53 PM

@csant
arabic bookmarks and menus only, don't panic, the browser is ok wink

the other point, that's of ui, i don't know what that xo looks, but i will be proud if olpc users found that opera is the most beautiful thing (in their expected thought) onto their olpc.
if your customers are children, then you had to care of their impression

GuilhermeSpyMan Friday, January 26, 2007 9:47:19 PM

I can't download Opera 9.12 from:

http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/o912w_8701m.exe

Is something wrong on your side?

[]s

João EirasxErath Saturday, January 27, 2007 12:23:12 PM

> I can't download Opera 9.12 from:

Probably because it's off topic.

Kamaleshkamalesh Saturday, January 27, 2007 4:20:00 PM

@xErath

hahaha.

xcvrasz Saturday, January 27, 2007 5:41:27 PM

WOOOHOO
this static build fixes http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=156692 for me! normal static builds do not, they also stall when opening new tabs, this one opens new tabs/links immediatelly without huge cpu spike

BUT, but as every static build
-GUI fonts are BUTT UGLY, it looks like bad kerning
[img]http://www.keepmyfile.com/thumb/1169911960a5824a.gif
http://www.keepmyfile.com/image/a5824a1354297

-clicking "Bookmarks" with RMB opens them, after opening bookmarks mouse cursor is right over the first bookmark, now letting go RMB makes opera immediatelly GO to the first bookmark ?!?!?! sad in dynamic builds one click opens bookmarks and SECOND click makes opera perform action, not letting go the first click

xcbxcbxcbxcbLontronics Sunday, January 28, 2007 12:54:52 PM

This build IS faster then the normal statics.

Please switch to GCC4.x for the normal static builds too wink

Jan

AbandonShip?masterofopera Sunday, January 28, 2007 7:49:58 PM

Huge buttons!
This skin reary seems to be experimental (some buttons look like
"Opera standart" skin). I do not like this Black skin.
I think, one of the best skins is: my_qute_blue-1_01
and all skins that are shiny/ crytal are cool. cool

I`m a newbee (regitered today) at opera community, where i can
upload screenshots of my own (more comfortable than
standart) "best of" Toolbar and button placement? As suggestion
for better new default Toolbar and button placement (s). I want
make Opera better and more comfotable, I want the users needn`t change so much for maximum comfort (I need minimum 10 minutes
extra).

OK, the Panel (default)is better, than in every other browser,
keep it (but add the black dubble arrows in the panel that
extend the downloadmanager etc. like in Opera 8.50`s default).
The rest of this standart Toolbar and button placement is not so
good that is the reason, why many people do not switch to Opera
and switch to or stay by FireFox or stay by Internet Explorer
( furious ). I have seen in many posts and bloggs, many people
hate this standart (Toolbar and button placement) setting and
switch to FireFox. I hate this standart setting too, but I do
not switch to FireFox, I customize Opera, but it is very time
consuming.

I have made a "BEST OF". Inspired By diffrent browsers, it will
make the switch to opera more easy. I have picked the best
details of all browsers, I used: internet exporer 6, FireFox
1.xxx, Opera 7.2x (test only [ads] ), Opera 8.xx (up to 8.4x
test only, since 8.50 as primary browser) , Opera 9.xx (up to
the actual 9.10).

My comfortable Toolbar and button placement got positive
feedback by people I know. Example: my one of my teachers, was
before 2 weeks an Internet Exploerer 5 & 6 user (he had never
testet an alternative browser bevore) , he likes my Toolbar and
button placement and did not be confused, switching
(uesung standart functions) was easy.

Info I nvver liked default Toolbar and button settings/ placements.
-> All testet and used browsers were affectet!!!!

Khaled KhalilKhaled-Khalil Monday, January 29, 2007 1:34:47 AM

@masterofopera

welcome, this post is for opera olpc edition not for the skin, but me too i didn't find the skin very attractive (as a child mind), buttons are so big because olpc has 200 dpi (dot per inch) which is very high for normal desktop, it must look fine on olpc.

for photos upload go to this page: http://my.opera.com/masterofopera/albums/ (while you are loged in) and start new album and go ahead
or as you think your toolbar configurations are worthy you can upload your setup here: http://my.opera.com/community/customize/setups/ .

what you wish, what you hate, you can explan all that in opera wishlist http://my.opera.com/community/forums/forum.dml?id=24 , hope opera developers hear you smile

here: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/ , you can dowload the last weekly release (of course beta) test it and annoye developers with bugs that you found as we do smile

i expect reading from you in the forums soon smile

Edgar P. NashNetegrof Tuesday, January 30, 2007 7:15:01 AM

I want to report a problem with that build I am browsing and the Opera menu toolbar don´t responds and I haveto repair the instalation, some time later everything back to normality and the used of virtual memory is very high, above to 100 Mb and last a page that before I can see it, now some images see out of place and I can fix with anything.

Edgar P. NashNetegrof Wednesday, January 31, 2007 3:52:39 AM

Hey I have another problem I lost my personal data, today when I start Opera, everything are like, if was the first time that Opera was started, my previous configuration disappear.

g4qb Wednesday, January 31, 2007 9:21:50 AM

could someone try this site out on the OLPC?

http://fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/prices/dsp_search.cfm?search=Price

try double clicking on ULP to get it to go to the right side
compare with Op 8.54
compare with IE7

assuming that this OLPC version is the same as build 8701,
it probably has the same unable to close windows bug.

a) open 5x tabs
b) Ctrl-0 for windows panel
c) select any
d) press delele key

nothing happens.

Kredit-Hai_allesaufkredit_ Thursday, February 1, 2007 2:53:23 PM

nice job guys! :-D

bexs Thursday, February 1, 2007 7:16:09 PM

Windows build this week?