Opera Running on the OLPC 193
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 still want one (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
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Re:I still want one (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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If it makes you feel better, I'm writing this out on a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 (Pentium 233 w/160MB RAM) and I still use my NeXT Cube a lot (mostly for light writing and the odd bit of PostScript programming).
William
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What I want (Score:3, Funny)
screen is stunning? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Informative)
Because "regular LCD monitors" don't have a special, black-and-white, high-resolution mode designed for use as an e-book reader under a wide variety of conditions with a small screen, instead being optimized for bright, vivid color use, and dealing with readability by making bigger screens.
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At that resolution, you don't need anti-aliasing, because you really can't see anything much smaller than a pixel. The 770 comes with Opera as standard, and it really does look amazing. I use mine as an eBook reader quite a lot (hats off to the FBReader guys); it's not quite as good as pa
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1. Because most purchasers insist on having color all the time.
2. Because lots of software will draw about 1/2 size on a 200 dpi screen, and fixing this would require rewriting lots of it and the system to get around huge amounts of assumption that 1-unit == 1-pixel. The OLPC can just claim to not run this software, as it won't run lots of stuff. Also such software requires color which will switch the OLPC into a lower-resolution mode.
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Because until Vista, Windows* was too braindead to properly use a high dpi display. You wouldn't want a 200 dpi computer screen because everything would be tiny, and couldn't be scaled up without breaking most programs' UIs.
(*To be fair, every other OS was too -- but if Windows had worked it would have driven demand for such monitors by itself.)
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Informative)
You're right, a "point" is technically 0.35277... mm (and is the standard measurement unit in PostScript) but the definition has become altered by popular usage so that 1 point now means 1 pixel on screen.
I usually put the line
near the beginning of all my PostScript documents. Then I can write things like 10 mm 10 mm moveto.
I hope that the OLPC people stand their ground and refuse to allow a closed-source browser, however beautiful it may look, anywhere near this thing. For one thing, it's the thin end of the wedge; the world and his cat will be wanting their slaveryware on the machine. For another, it's the absolute antithesis of what the OLPC project is about; everything on the machine must be open if we're not to be encouraging dependency.
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Drivers are innately hardware defendant. Their only purpose is to expose hardware functionality. Proprietary drivers are *really obnoxious*, because they have bugs that you can't fix, but they are - by nature - a short term problem. When that hardware gets replaced, there will be different drivers. Free drivers are much better, but it's not as important as other software, because other software lasts much longer than one hardware generation.
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Meanwhile, Windows is ubiquitously set to 96. As a result, a 10pt x 10pt rectangle on your screen measures 13.3 pixels square.
A properly configured X system, on the other hand, can usually tell your screen's resolution in Real World Units, from the DPMS info. On a linux box, one point is one point, regardless of how high your resolution is. Still, things measured in pixels (non svg icons, the thickness of y
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You'll be shocked when you see it.
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Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Funny)
Quick - somebody post a screenshot!
Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Informative)
The number of LCDs which need to be produced to get a single LCD that works perfectly is exponential in the physical area of the screen, because defects are independant, based on the size of the crystal, and cannot be repaired. This factor means that a "stunning" tiny screen is a whole lot cheaper than a big screen of worse image quality. The OLPC computer is actually smaller than the pictures make it look, because the whole thing is uniformly child-sized.
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200 dpi mode is monochrome, e-ink mode for ebook mode, capable of being read comfortably even under direct sunlight. and yes, having pixels so small you can't see them without a magnifying glass DOES look nice.
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Your LCD uses more or less the same technology your 5 year-old LCD uses. The OLPC display has a LED backlight, higher energy and light efficiency due to an innovative non-absorbing color splitting layer and has a 200dpi reflective mode (transmissive mode is also somewhere around 200dpi, but it's a little more complicated than that).
They are not really the same, so it's very hard to compare them.
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Not too suprising... (Score:4, Informative)
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Beg to differ, but it runs like crap on mine. The 2006 OS improved the problems with constantly running out of memory, but seemed to make it crash a lot more. I can usually flip through a couple of article pages on /. before the OS freezes up and the device is forced to reboot itself. It also has a very tiny screen that often makes it difficult to select links. You tap and nothing happens. The only way to op
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Try it with simple webpages that are not heavy in graphics, you'll see that Opera DS is quite fast. And my Nintendo DS + Opera DS fits in my shirt pocket, your Amiga doesn't.
And last, Nintendo DS + Opera DS is still cheaper than most Wi-Fi enabled PDAs too, not to mention their (usually) non-standard browsers. And Opera DS has both
Opera is better on any system (Score:5, Informative)
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I wonder if they tested KHTML on it...?
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I generally recommend Opera for old hardware, for that very reason. I remember one time my brother dredged up an old 486 laptop with next-to-no memory (by today's standards) and managed to get some version of Windows running on it. Just for kicks, we tried running several browsers, but the only one we could get to start in less than a minute (other than IE 2.0, which is literally unusable since it doesn't send a Host: header on HTTP requests, and therefore is unable to visit any
In the eye (Score:2)
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 b
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I understand that the OPCL gizmo has a non-standard resolution screen. Opera wasn't designed for this screen, but it still apparently runs smoothly out-of-the-box.
I wouldn't say this website [opera.com] has good fonts or a nice aesthetic sense. Too much green for me. :-)
O
Not enough revert from free to proprietary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not enough revert from free to proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I'll post this anonymously... It's not good to bash Gecko on
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Firefox 2 still doesnt pass it. Most standards compliant browser my ass.
(posting from webkit)
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Perhaps. But if I remember correctly, about a year ago every Firefox fanboy was trumpeting Acid2 as the ultimate browser test, and going on about how Firefox was going to pass it before IE. And they might, because the IE devs just don't care. But the fanboys all shutup when every other browser passed. Funny how that works.
Why not konqueror? (Score:2)
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Wrong (Score:2)
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Re:Why not konqueror? (Score:5, Informative)
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I personally quite like Konqueror, and would ac
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Please, God, tell me you were talking about reconfiguring Opera to use GTK+ and not Konq! I'm not sure whoever commits a heresy of that magnitude would survive the night!
Charles
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Oh I can answer that! (Score:2)
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, ma
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The problem with Opera is that it goes against the OLPC spirit, which is to give children a system wher
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Remember, these computers are for educational purposes. How often do you analyze the chemical formulas of the products you use? Do all children need to be chemists? Then why does one have chemistry classes at school?
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Who cares about "best"? Frequently, Free Software *is* the technically best solution, but even if it isn't it's still the best choice. Freedom is way more important than minor technical differences. Without Free Software, every user is dependent on the software developer for support. Will Opera add a feature to their program for the cost of getting a couple local programmers? Even if they would, is that better than helping the local economy?
A project like OLPC should be helping local economies become self-
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I'd say that the terrible thing is that you don't understand freedom, and thus don't have any reason to value it.
Let's look at the result of two possible choices for the OLPC project: Opera and Firefox. Both offer a very similar user experience - so similar that if they work properly, an average user won't even notice the difference. There are two significant areas of difference: Opera uses less RAM, Firefox is Free Software.
Choosing Firefox has an immediate disadvantage of requiring more RAM in each OLPC
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Unless Opera open sources its browser... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Site is slow - here's the text (Score:3, Informative)
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!
[slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org]--> [slashdot.org] -->
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 [laptop.org]. 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 [opera.com] 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 [laptop.org]. 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 [laptop.org]. 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 [opera.com] 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 [mit.edu], Walter [mit.edu] and Mako [mako.cc]. At Opera [opera.com], 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 [laptop.org] was quite simp
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Site was slow (Score:2)
Title is misleading! (Score:2, Funny)
mirror (Score:5, Informative)
http://6thstreetradio.org/~davek/olpc/ [6thstreetradio.org]
The 4 images are there, though, which is probably what most people want.
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Opera is everywhere (Score:3, Informative)
Most important image ;) (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't know, maybe SAFARI, the browser that was first across the finish line for Acid2?
Not to mention iCab and (as another poster mentioned) Konqueror.
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It does nothing to test how well or completely a browser implements CSS when the CSS is actually correct.
I don't think OLPC means what you think it means (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I don't think OLPC means what you think it mean (Score:2)
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No, it's for the kids. If it weren't, it wouldn't be bright green [laptop.org], have a child-size keyboard with a weird layout [laptop.org], or use software obviously designed [laptop.org] for children [laptop.org].
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What Opera gets? (Score:2)
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1. I am pretty sure Opera has a deal with Google for using it as the default search engine. More eyes = more money.
2. Standards. If enough people use Opera then people will have to code websites to work with it so more people will use Opera.
3. Why not? They had one on hand and it runs Linux.
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If they become ubiquitous, compatible but more powerful machines for business, government, and industry (as well as private purchase) will be a market in the countries in which they are ubiquitous, as will software for such machines.
For that matter, so will OLPC software; both governments and the individual owners (not every schoolchild in the devel
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Once somebody has decided to open a vegetarian r
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I guess that's true... unless you have ethics.
Luckily, some people do have ethics - including the people involved in the OLPC program.
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Dillo (Score:3, Informative)
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 dev
Re:the real important question (Score:4, Funny)
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