Unix changes



Our Unix version is undergoing a lot of radical changes for the 10.5 release. It has been mentioned earlier that we are removing our dependency on the Qt libraries. By doing this, we hope to integrate better with the popular desktop environments out there, and we allow Opera to run without the need for a library that might or might not be installed on your system.

This means that you can run Opera without any graphical toolkit installed if you want to (plain X11), but if you do have toolkits installed, Opera will try to load and use them to integrate into the environment. Currently we are focusing on getting support for Gnome/GTK+ and KDE4/Qt4 into 10.5. The work on KDE4 integration is not at a stage yet where we think it can be used, so this pre-alpha release only has support for GTK. As a work in progress, you will notice that not all UI elements conform to their GTK specifications yet.

Like the other pre-alpha releases, the Unix build includes Carakan, our new javascript engine. The engine might be more unstable in 64-bit builds than in 32-bit.

Some features, such as printing and drag-and-drop functionality, are missing from this build.

Because this is a pre-alpha release, we don't recommend you to install it over your existing Opera installation. This is why we are releasing only non-installable tarballs instead of installable packages. To run Opera, extract the tarball and run './opera' from the main directory.

Video

Video support was first shown to the world by Opera in a labs release in 2007. Since then, things have changed a lot; you can read more about it in Philip's blog post. The Unix and Windows builds released today have support for the video element.

On Windows this should work out of the box. On Unix, you need to have some gstreamer plugins installed to get video support (on most distros, the packages are known as the gstreamer 'base' plugins). Unfortunately, video element support for Mac wasn't ready yet, but you can expect to see this in the future.

Other changes

Compared to the release from last week, these builds contain a small number of improvements that might help with stability.

Download

As before, this build represents a very early work in progress; many things are known not to work, and it will crash, burn and eat the occasional small household appliance.

• Windows MSI/ Windows Classic
• Macintosh (Intel-only)
• Unix/Linux

A happy new year from all of us in the desktop team!