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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.'"
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!
Technology moves on....
I paid over EUR1600 for my LCD monitor, back in the day.
200DPI is very high resolution for a monitor, 2/3rds that of the 300 DPI considered acceptable for print. Add in subpixel rendering, and it means the screen should near enough be clear enough to read comfortably. Due to windoze brain-damage, lots of computer users still think in resolution-dependent pixel sizes.
But on a monitor, a font that is 10 points high (a real-world unit) should be the same height on a 640x480 display and a 2048x1560 one. It should just be far clearer on the latter.
The OLPC's screen has a black and white 200dpi mode. I imagine that has something to do with the price.
Unfortunately, Gecko is far too big and bloated for the OLPC. It doesn't run good at all on the machine, from what I've heard (even requiring extra memory to be installed), and frankly, I don't think it has its place there. Opera might not be the best choice since it's proprietary (although it's the perfect fit for such a device given the available resources), but perhaps something based on KHTML could have found its way to the OLPC.
/. :(
I think I'll post this anonymously... It's not good to bash Gecko on
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.