The Opera Web Browser

Opera provides "tabbed" browsing, a history of URLs and preservation of bookmarks/favorites.  It is also rumored to run much faster than the preinstalled Browse activity.  This version of Opera was made by the Opera organization specifically for the OLPC.  It supports an early version of Flash which will let you take advantage of sites that offer multimedia content.  It even allows you to install Java What it can't do is download and unpack activities from the OLPC Activities page.  If you want to download and easily install packaged activities, you should use the preinstalled Browse activity.

Maybe the best aspect of Opera is that Opera can save content directly to the XO (Linux) directory structure. 

There are two and possibly three steps involved:

  1. install Opera
  2. install the Opera Activity files
  3. maybe, install a version of Flash that is compatible with Opera

1) Opera is a bit more complex to install than a typical activity.  For the latest instructions go here. Starting  with version 703 of the OS, you can copy and paste in the Terminal activity.  So save yourself a lot of typing (and typos) by copying the command instructions from your Browse window and paste them into the Terminal activity.

2) The instructions for installing the Opera Activity files (so that opera appears in the activity bar) are also located here.  You can run Opera from the Terminal activity in the mean time by typing "opera" at the prompt.  Once you've launched Opera, you should be able to download a script that would install the the Opera Activity files for you - we will try to set up these scripts for you.

3) You can install Flash for either the Browse activity or the Opera activity - but I don't believe you can simultaneously install it for both.  The reason is because Browse supports the last version of Flash but Opera does not.  So, decide which browser you are likely to access these multi-media sites from and follow the appropriate instructions on this page.   Since you've already installed Opera, it should be possible to save a script file to the /home/olpc/Activities directory and then simply execute it from within the Terminal activity -- rather than go through all the steps described on the OLPC wiki.  We will try to set up these scripts for you.

su -l
wget flash90115.notlong.com
rpm -i flash-plugin-9.0.115.0-release.i386.rpm
exit

Note that each time you reinstall or upgrade the XO operating system (Sugar), you will need to reinstall at least Flash and possibly Opera as well.
 

 Page last changed: 07/18/2008