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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.'"
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
Here's a little snippet of the availability of the OLPC. It's looking really good for us OLPC supporters. I was in contact with one of the designers a few months ago, and he said by March '07, they would be down to about $60-$90 to produce and that they might even start wholesaling them if they could get the proper government contracts in Pakistan. It's looking very interesting from an economist's standpoint.
Unles Opera open sources its browser, this news of little value. There is little chance closed source Opera will be installed on any standard OLPC distribution. The OLPC guys made such a huge issue out of close-source wireless Marvel chips, the only closed-source hardware component of the laptop that Marvel finally open source its drivers. So whoever thinks they would allow close-source browser on the 100$ 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
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
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!
An interesting thought here is how useful it might be as an accessory to a normal desktop or laptop?
It'll certainly make a much nicer ebook reader than most which are already available.
I'm surprised that companies like vTech and Leapster haven't looked into licensing these.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.