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Opera Running on the OLPC
An anonymous reader writes "The Opera developers have ported their browser to the $100 laptop. Håkon Wium Lie writes: 'Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation — no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts.' Claudio Santambrogio writes: 'Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera's performance is excellent — the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer.'"
Great. So when can we buy one?
When can we buy one at 3 times the target price to make a donation to poorer countries?
Will this only ever be vapourware over here?
I paid 700 quid for my monitor. The entire laptop is 100 USD. How exactly is the screen "stunning", in the slightly breathless tone of the article?
While that is good as it will bring OLPC users a browser, what good is it for Opera? It's not like OLPC is a potential market, or will become one in near future.
Not too suprising - the browser built into the Nokia 770 is a customized Opera, it works great...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
For those who don't know, Opera has been the browser of choice for embedded platforms like Qtopia because of it speed and small footprint. I'm glad to see its full potential finally realized.
Håkon Wium Lie writes: 'Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation -- no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts.'
dpi? fonts? OK, but how does he get from an appreciation of those elements to a "revelation" about the "browser" "being" beautiful?
It sounds like he looked at some content on a high res screen with good fonts and said "wow. My browser is good".
But if his browser really is standards compliant, the irony is that the browser itself is invisible.
I think I'd be happier running free software, and giving free software to developing nations. Let them tinker, let them become experts, let them become self sustaining rather than start them on a path to dependency.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
How exactly is my article over-rated, when there are no ratings on it?
It's a shame the meta-moderation process doesn't let you know the article score when the moderation was given, so you can catch out improper uses like this.
(I await this post being marked off-topic...)
Unles Opera open sources its browser, this news of little value. There is little chance closed source Opera will be installed on any standard OLPC distribution. The OLPC guys made such a huge issue out of close-source wireless Marvel chips, the only closed-source hardware component of the laptop that Marvel finally open source its drivers. So whoever thinks they would allow close-source browser on the 100$ laptops must be out of little mad...
Opera on the green machine
On Friday, I received a call from Opera's accounting department. That normally means trouble. My warning lights starts flashing.
There's a package for you waiting here. I'm looking for the invoice for customs purposes. Can I open it?
Sure, I said, hoping to quickly return to whatever I was doing.
There's no invoice inside. Strange. The value has been declared to be 100 dollars
100 dollars?
Yes. There's a machine inside the package. It's cute. Green.
GREEN? A GREEN MACHINE? 100 DOLLARS?
Yes.
DON'T MOVE. DON'T LET ANYONE ELSE SEE IT. LOCK THE DOORS. I'LL BE RIGHT THERE!
--> -->
As the alert reader has figured out by now, the machine inside the box was a prototype of the $100 laptop from the OLPC project. Since then, I've kept the machine close to me, but lots of people around here have seen it. The Opera geeks gathered around it at the Friday night beer bash. Someone suggested testing to see if the machine could keep running in rough environments. For example, would the rubbery keyboard withstand beer? Better not try.
Invariably, the machine gets attention. It attracts people more than any other unit I've seen. (Only Wii comes close.) People want to see it, touch it, and feel it. They want to know why the USB ports are placed where they are (on both sides of the screen), how the SD card can be inserted (the SD port is under the screen), and where the crank is. The crank, meant to generate power to run the machine, was part of an early design. It has been replaced with a foot pedal which is still under construction. However, it seems that people somehow got emotionally attached to the hand crank and want it back.
Once the machine is turned on, a Linux boot sequence appears. Red Hat is one of the sponsors and the machine comes with a tuned version of Fedora. New boot images are published regularly, and the first thing to do was to install the latest build. All of this is documented at the project's Wiki. The next thing to do was to find a shell. The magical key combination is Alt-Shift-F11. However, the keys don't have function numbers and finding F11 requires counting. When you get it right, a shell appears and you can start typing. Typing would have been easier if my hands were smaller. That's a feature, not a bug.
For me, the next thing to do was to install Opera. This is also the reason why the OLPC people are kind enough to send us an early prototype: we want to make sure the machine has a choice of good browsers. The browser is easily the most important application on the machine. In fact, a modern browser is more than an application — it could be the platform onto which OLPC applications are built, like Opera Platform is for mobile phones. OLPC has decided to only include open source software on the machine. I have discussed this issue at length with Nicholas, Walter and Mako. At Opera, we think that what really counts is open standards. It's less important what runs inside the box as long as what crosses the wire is standards-compliant. They argue that, in an education project, students must be allowed to peek inside the box. That's nice, I say, but if Opera makes the difference between a usable or an unusable machine, perhaps you will reconsider?
Getting Opera to run was quite simp
I was expecting to see Opera running on one of the children... :(
I know it's basic and maybe that's not the exact browser they should use, but it seems like there should be a simpler solution given the system's limited resourses. I'm starting to get the impression that a lot of companies are just jumping on the OLPC bandwagon. I understand why the OLPC would accept any help it gets, but wonder how much these companies are really helping.
the more miserable you are now, the funnier the story will be later
The site has a robots.txt that doesn't allow a quick mirror. I had to cut-y-paste the image links into a terminal and use wget for each one.
http://6thstreetradio.org/~davek/olpc/
The 4 images are there, though, which is probably what most people want.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
The hot chick with the ponytail poured $100 worth of grits down my pants. Thank you.
After playing with Opera for Nintendo DS since last friday, it doesn't surprise me one bit to see Opera running on the OLPC. After all, they even have a mobile version for cellphones, so they're used to make their software work with extremely limited hardware.
http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/olpc/img/SH10 6875-m.JPG
Yes, that thing can display slashdot. Just what the third world needs, more geeks!
I use konqueror for most of my browsing, it's "free" in both meanings, comes with full source code. In other words, the ideal browser for the OLPC.
Rethinking email
was that it passes the acid test.
can you say that about any other browser on the market today?
Just an honest question- why wouldn't they use something like Dildo
I know it's basic and maybe that's not the exact browser they should use, but it seems like there should be a simpler solution given the system's limited resourses. I'm starting to get the impression that a lot of companies are just jumping on the OLPC bandwagon. I understand why the OLPC would accept any help it gets, but wonder how much these companies are really helping.
Another Reason to realize the superiority of Opera and switch over. Viva La Opera! Hey, its a form of art! :)
One word: Safari
Because then they will have to put a processor good enough to run Konqueror crap libs and they would have to include 512MB of memory in order to make it usable...
Yeah, that is why Opera is so cool, I used to use it in the Navigator vs Explorer days, then I moved to firefox and just recently I moved again to Opera. I use Linux and I have used Konqueror and all the resource hungry KDE things but I decided not to touch any Krelated software as they are very unstable and resource hungry (from debian, fedora, mandriva and ubuntu experience over here).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Dillo is philosophically a perfect match for this project. One of its goals is to bridge the "digital divide" by providing a fast, low-footprint browser that can run on cheap or old hardware.
Unfortunately, current versions have no support for JavaScript or CSS, and character sets other than Latin1 currently require a patch. The next version will have Unicode support, due to the switch from GTK1 to FLTK2, and CSS is being worked on. But the project is bogged down due to lack of funding, and the main developers are having to spend time on other projects so they can do stuff like eat and pay rent. Jorge Arellano Cid describes it as a chicken-and-egg problem:
Unfortunately, those gaps severely limit Dillo's suitability for a large-scale "here's all you need!" project. In an ideal world, OLPC would invest some cash in Dillo so that they developers could at least finish the port to FLTK2 and basic CSS support, which would go a long way toward making it fit with the project's goals, and maybe even get started on JavaScript.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
"Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera's performance is excellent -- the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer." - http://my.opera.com/csant/blog/2006/12/18/opera-on -the-olpc
"At the moment, we are struggling with a problem that seems to be caused by Opera. When visiting sites that use JavaScript heavily, the machine freezes intermittently." - http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/olpc/
Discrepancy anyone?
Wow... they are going to sell a $30 browser for a $100 laptop.
Amazing how the puling, drooling morons gnashing their teeth and tearing out their hair over a so-called "Microsoft Tax" will jump for joy over an OS-X tax and an Opera tax.
Sure is hard being an anti-MS zealot. There are so many contradictions in their logic to ignore... but it's exactly like any religion in that respect.
supports Mozilla foundation. They gave them $77M. The excuse was that mozilla redirected searches to google search. And in other words, google makes money when you search.
OTOH, google blacklists konqueror.
Go figure who is "friend of open source"!
At some point, somebody realized that a super-cheap laptop could do 90% of what people want to do with laptops. How to get them made? Try to make it yourself, you'll end up like DeLorean - the industry'll see to it that you fail before you can upset their applecarts! So . . . yeah! Pretend you're trying to make it for third world children! Think of the children!
CEO's, captains of industry, unaware of what they're doing begin working to be involved in making the last thing in the world they want to make - exactly what the consuming public really wants - a tough, reliable laptop computer suitable for on-the-go use at rock-bottom (true commodity) prices! I wonder if any of them are stopping to think that these things will have an impact on how we (collectively) see computers and computing, and the price associated with them? Just look around this post - half the comments are "I'd like one of those!". If I knew that the manufacturer was able to make 'em and sell 'em for $100.00, it'd sure make me think twice about plunking down $700.00 for a machine which, while shinier, is unlikely to do a lot more for me as a mobile computing platform.
In a way, this could be vaguely akin to Henry Ford's contribution to the automotive industry - utility and pricing set to put one in every garage (on every laptop). You can have it any color you like - as long as it's green!
Communists? You read it right.
Putting Opera on the OLPC would be just like IBM inviting MS to produce their OS. No thanks. There are a lot of people who would like to take advantage of the OLPC project's goodwill and future ubiquity. I hope the OLPC project has the good sense to tell would be opportunistic vultures to take a hike.
Which is what the thing is actually called, even though no one seems to recognize it as such yet.
Opera did not port the browser. The Opera Desktop 9.1 static version runs right out of the box on the OLPC.
At first glance, I thought it said
Oprah Running...What a terrible, terrible thought.
I nominate "Opera Running on the OLPC Laptop".
The cutie sitting on the floor with it.
+++ATH0
I fail to see how Opera's closed source prohibits the browser from being used on the OLPC if it happens to perform best at rendering standards compliant web content. In exactly the spirit of free software ANYBODY and their dog can make a competing product for this hardware. If Opera at the time outperforms anything else, and everything legal is taken care of, let the show move on. If there should be some funny incidents down the road, just fall back to that other browser that also kicks ass on tiny platforms (not sure which).
Closed-source hardware on the other hand, is a showstopper, whenever there's a falling-out with the hardware manufacturers, your $100 million worth of laptop may need extensive an illegal reverse-engineering to become usable again.
You can choose software whenever, but the hardware will have stay the same.
analog < infinite binary (Heisenberg is with me on this one)
Um, have you read the whole of the first post?
Well, yeah, the box had a low MaxClients setting, because sysadmins thought that was all it was going to take, but they yanked it up and it worked. A slashdotting isn't what it used to be. :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Higher DPI is not good, or bad, it's just a choice. Higher DPI means that there can be more detail in a given area, but that everything will appear smaller. Generally speaking laptops favour high DPI LCDs, desktops favour lower DPI LCDs. As an example I have a 24" widescreen LCD on my desktop, it's 1920x1200 resolution. That gives a 94DPI, which is normal for 24" monitors and in the middle of what you find on desktop displays. My coworker has a 17" widescreen laptop which also has a display that's 1920x1200, that's 132DPI. You'll notice the trend continues down with televisions, which you sit farther away form. You can find 50" TVs that are 1920x1080 which is less than 50DPI.
It's not like a high DPI monitor is some kind of holy grail we should be after, and it's not like it's not something that can't be made. There's just tradeoffs. Not only is everything smaller, which isn't always desirable, but of course it costs more (more pixels = more transistors = more money) and requires more display hardware to drive.
Building a small, high rez LCD isn't that difficult or expensive these days.
In the case of the graphics card companies, the two that get the most heat for it, there are two main reasons:
1) They can't because of licensing. Both ATi and nVidia license various things for their drivers, the licenses of which prohibit opening the code to the world. It's not a simple case of "Well just don't license it then," because we are talking stuff that's important to their mass market consumers.
2) To keep the other guys form knowing what they are doing. Drivers are a point that help them sell cards. I buy only nVidia cards because I like their drivers better. For example nVidia drivers have the ability to set how scaling is done on an LCD. You can stretch all images to max, stretch all images to the max that maintains the correct aspect ratio, or use a 1:1 mapping. This is important to me since my monitor doesn't do that. Well, neither do ATi's drivers, and I'm sure it's something nVidia isn't interested in them getting.
For most companies I think it comes down to a combination of things that boil down to they don't see the benefit. Part of it is simple paranoia, companies are always worried about giving away secrets. After all, you are getting fired, or worse, if you open a driver and that leads to a competitor getting an edge, but nobody internally will be pissed if you say no. Part of it is just laziness. It does take some effort, even if not a whole lot, to open up your code. It's not quite as simple as "just post it on a website". You need to go through and check it to make sure there's nothing in it that would be a problem if released (maybe one of your programmers used a racial slur as a variable name) and you have to get a site set up for it, and a process for getting it put there as it's updated and so on. Part of it is not wanting to support it. Even when you release something and say "no support at all" you still have to support it to some degree. There's no such thing as an official release that you don't support at all. If nothing else you have to support it to the extent of making sure the download works, and likely it'll be more than that.
I think that's just what it usually comes down to is there's just not a big enough benefit to opening up driver code, especially given that there's potential risks. It makes OSS heads happy but really, they aren't a major concern, they just aren't a major buying force.
Thought so.
imho the nicest browser on my PC is always the latest version of Opera - and the stuff they've done on mobiles is stunning (both java and symbian). This is helped in no small part by using their servers to cache and scale to fit - making the whole experience very snappy on a small screened device.
Not just PCs and phones, but there's also the Wii and DS versions of Opera.
Even if we leave out the fine work above, opera have innovated in all manner of ways. Tabbed browsing way before Firefox and stuff like mouse gestures which I can no longer live without (although i've switched to the wonderous free StrokeIt which allows gestures on all apps).
IE7 works well, but it's well... IE and Firefox seems to be heading the way of Mozilla and getting quite bloaty. I suspect the problem with OSS is that everybody loves to add new shiney bells and whistles and nobody says 'enough, just leave it and make it stable' (Not really a judgement, as I know I much prefer to create than fix myself).
"What is OLPC?"
I know anyone can look this up on acronymfinder.com, or find the answer to this question after clicking the link and then clicking the first reference to OLPC in "the fucking article", but does no slashdot article submitter* ever think "Hey I could save a few hundred dumb slashdot readers a couple seconds of lost productivity by simply including the definition to this acronym that maybe not everyone knows!"?!?
(*: or editor for that matter)
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