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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?
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.
A good deed is its own reward - even for companies.
If you don't believe that, believe this - respect has monetary value. It affects who will buy, the price of stocks, the confidence of shareholders, and lots of other unmentioned things. By doing this, Opera buys themselves some respect for fairly cheap which they can cash in later at a premium.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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
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!
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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... :(
It's over-rated because, well, that's a moderation. If I want to mark you down, but you're not really a troll or flamebaiter, I just mod you overrated.
have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
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
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!
Unfortunately, Konqueror is tied into KDE. You could maybe wrap the KHTML rendering engine in an alternate skin, but that'd be a huge project. It might be less bother to persuade Opera to open up their source code.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
Actually, it is not. The Konqueror-Embedded project has had a working browser for some time. It does require QT or QT/Embedded, but then again so does the version of Opera they were testing.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
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!
Uh, help me see it - so the guys at Opera are going to mass-produce a parallel product, OOLPC (One Opera Laptop Per Child), for which they will maintain identical standards to the competition's OLPC until their OOLPC machine becomes the standard, which they will then use to eliminate all competing laptop manufacturers? After that, I presume they will force all the OOLPC users to upgrade their hardware regularly, in accordance with some onerous and despicable "click-wrap" license?
Sorry, dude - I followed you right up to the point where you said "Just like IBM" - after that, you lost me!
The cutie sitting on the floor with it.
+++ATH0