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Opera Running on the OLPC

Posted by Zonk on Tue Dec 19, 2006 10:41 AM
from the music-in-the-strangest-of-places dept.
Portables The Internet Technology Hardware
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.'"
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  • I still want one (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by TrisexualPuppy (976893)
      Here's a little snippet of the availability of the OLPC [wikipedia.org]. 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.

      • Re:I still want one (Score:5, Interesting)

        by WillAdams (45638) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:46AM (#17301038) Homepage
        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

    • Man, I would drop $200 on this just for the browsing and ebook mode. Heck, I'd probably buy two at $200 a piece so my daughter could have one too. I'm a little suprised its taken this long, and that there isn't a drive to make them commerically as well. Make the ones "for sale" to us commoners in black or white, to distinguish from the governmentally purchased ones if you're concerned about resales.

  • screen is stunning? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Toby The Economist (811138) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @10:47AM (#17300376)
    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?

    • Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Informative)

      by ambrosen (176977) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:01AM (#17300514) Homepage
      You almost certainly don't have a 200ppi screen. My mobile phone has one, and it is indeed stunning. My laptop has a premium 127ppi screen, and that is nice, but 200ppi does look very good on a computer.

      • Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Toby The Economist (811138) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:04AM (#17300542)
        If 200dpi is so good, how come regular LCD monitors are *not* 200 dpi, when a 100 USD *entire laptop* can have such a screen?

        • Re:screen is stunning? (Score:5, Informative)

          by crow5599 (994334) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:08AM (#17300586)
          The OLPC's screen has a black and white 200dpi mode. I imagine that has something to do with the price.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Tyler Eaves (344284)
          Because of the amount of horsepower that would be required to drive such a display. For instance, a typical 19" 4:3 monitor at 200ppi would be a 3000x2400 display.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by Tyler Eaves (344284)
              I'm not sure even a dual-DVI link can provide the nessesary bandwidth. A 24bit 3000x2400 pixel display is going to be 21.6MB per frame, at a typical 60hz that's 1.2*GB* per second of bandwidth.

        • Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Informative)

          by DragonWriter (970822) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @12:37PM (#17301568)
          If 200dpi is so good, how come regular LCD monitors are *not* 200 dpi, when a 100 USD *entire laptop* can have such a screen?


          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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by TheRaven64 (641858)
          The screen on the Nokia 770 is 225dpi and it looks stunning. IBM made some 23" workstation monitors that were also 225dpi, but they pre-dated dual-link DVI so they used two DVI inputs and Xinerama for a single screen.

          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

    • Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:02AM (#17300532)
      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.

      • Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Informative)

        by ajs318 (655362) <sd_resp2@earthsI ... inus threevowels> on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:38AM (#17300932)
        The 200DPI is with sub-pixel rendering. The OLPC's LCD has a colour mode and a hi-res mono mode.

        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
        /mm { 360 mul 127 div } def
        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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by hey! (33014)

      How exactly is the screen "stunning", in the slightly breathless tone of the article?


      You'll be shocked when you see it.

    • Re:screen is stunning? (Score:4, Informative)

      by iabervon (1971) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:30AM (#17300824) Homepage Journal
      The screen is small in total size, probably has a lot of dead pixels (which are tiny, so who cares?) and doesn't have good color accuracy or consistency. There was an article a while back about how the OLPC project visionary went to an LCD manufacturer and told them that the OLPC screen didn't need any of the features that make LCDs expensive to make, and did need a bunch of different features. They laughed at him, and then he told them that he wanted quantities of millions, and they were suddenly very nice.

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Brazilian Joe (514100)
      Color mode is not 200dpi, but new development technologies allowed it to consume just 1 watt. This new tech is eventually going to be used on all LCDs, as its development was meant for both power consumption *and* production cost reduction.
      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.

  • Not too suprising... (Score:4, Informative)

    by i.r.id10t (595143) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @10:50AM (#17300420)
    Not too suprising - the browser built into the Nokia 770 is a customized Opera, it works great...
      • Also consider that your Amiga isn't swapping data to an external RAM cart (which is much slower than internal RAM), and maybe you'll understand why Opera DS isn't lightning-fast.

        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)

    by CDMA_Demo (841347) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @10:50AM (#17300424) Homepage
    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.
    • Whats interesting, and quite damming in its own way, is that the test systems had to have extra memory included because of the requirements of a certain other browser.

  • 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

  • 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.

    • Re:Not enough revert from free to proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:16AM (#17300662)
      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 /. :(

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by AVee (557523)
        I won't post anonymous, but state it here load and clear: Gecko is far too big and bloated. Period. Plus, Firefox 2 is to buggy to be taken seriously for any use at all and standards compliance seems to be defined as 'just be a bit better than IE'. Frankly, most recent Mozilla stuff sucks big time, like most other commercially sucessfull software. There it is. Now mod me down please.
    • I use konqueror for most of my browsing, it's "free" in both meanings, comes with full source code. In other words, the ideal browser for the OLPC.

  • Unless Opera open sources its browser... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ezh (707373) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:12AM (#17300622)
    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...

  • Site is slow - here's the text (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:15AM (#17300648)
    As A/C - I've plenty of karma.

    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

  • Title is misleading! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was expecting to see Opera running on one of the children... :(

  • mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by davek (18465) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:30AM (#17300822) Homepage Journal
    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/ [6thstreetradio.org]

    The 4 images are there, though, which is probably what most people want.

  • Opera is everywhere (Score:3, Informative)

    by Yvan256 (722131) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:32AM (#17300856) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Most important image ;) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nachtwind (686907) * on Tuesday December 19 2006, @11:32AM (#17300860)
    http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/olpc/img/SH10 6875-m.JPG [opera.com] Yes, that thing can display slashdot. Just what the third world needs, more geeks!

  • I don't think OLPC means what you think it means (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dorceon (928997) on Tuesday December 19 2006, @01:25PM (#17302384)
    Opera Running on the OLPC
    The PC in OLPC does not stand for Personal Computer. If it was
    Opera Running on the One Laptop Per Child
    the problem with this title would be obvious. It's bad form to rearrange other peoples' acronyms, so
    Opera Running on the One-Per-Child Laptop
    is right out. I suggest:
    Opera Running on $100 Laptop

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fireboy1919 (257783) <rustyp.freeshell@org> on Tuesday December 19 2006, @10:58AM (#17300480) Homepage Journal
      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.
    • Choose the benefit you want:
      • Brand recognition: Lots of people will know Opera. By word of mounth, lots can buy it.
      • Market dominance: Opera will start to show up at web statistics. It can now get out of the "nobody uses that" class, and it could be the end of the "your browser is not supported" messages.
      • Charity: Yep, companies also do that. It is normaly a way of getting free publicity, or fix problems with their image, but they do.
      • It's free: It doesn't cost Opera anything, since (as you stated) those pe
    • Because usability and features trumps ideology, as it should in any project that wants to succeed.
      • For this project, Open Source isn't just a nice bit of ideology added-on as an afterthought. It's an integral part of the whole project. Some of the machine's usefulness is derived directly from the Openness of the software installed on it. If the software isn't Open Source, then it can't be field-maintained; it can't be built upon; and it can't be used as an example in an advanced programming principles class. That already makes the machine less useful.

        Once somebody has decided to open a vegetarian r
        • The OLPC project is made to be as open-source as feasable. Not open-source at all costs. Much as I myself deride them for being techno-utopian airheads, they actually want to ship a decent product. Now. Linux and the other parts of the open-source stack is simply a means to that end.

    • Dillo (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kelson (129150) *

      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

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