Wednesday, February 15, 2012 9:20:35 AM
createpkg, source tracking
I tend to use a wide variety of distros, particularly when testing Opera. Occasionally I find that one of my favourite utilities isn't available, is old or has been compiled with different options. At this stage I usually compile the software from source.
When compiling from source one would ideally create native packages. This offers several advantages, e.g. it allows transfer of the software to other machines (for install or backup) and makes things much simpler should you ever need to remove the software. The problem however is that some packaging formats are complex, require large configuration files and a fair bit of specific knowledge before you can make a native package. My own solution to this is a short and simple shell script that automates creation of very simple tar "packages" with an internal log.
Read more...
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 10:53:02 AM
rpmrebuild, redhat, RPM, scientific
...
We use LZMA/XZ compression on our rpm packages to keep them as small as possible. However, this has the downside that Opera will not install on some older RPM-based distros as their RPM version does not support these newer compression methods. There is however a couple of fairly trivial work arounds.
Read more...
Sunday, January 15, 2012 8:45:00 PM
rpm2cpio, RPM
I was playing around on a machine with no RPM utilities and needed to extract the contents of some rpms, so I wrote my own rpm2cpio in less than 20 lines of shell script. It's a bit of hack but it seems to do the job on all the rpms I've tested thus far, and I have tested quite a few.
Read more...
Monday, January 9, 2012 9:05:53 PM
freebsd, titlebar, decoration, linux
...
Previously I wrote about
themes on Linux/FreeBSD. I thought people might be interested in a couple of updated screen shots.
The changes? The most obvious are Minimise, Maximise/Restore and close button decorations, plus lots of little bug fixes.
Read more...
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 11:33:18 PM
chrome, rant
Whilst I (unsuprisingly) use Opera for my day to day browsing, I do have several other browsers installed to allow me to do quick comparative tests. I generally like to keep them all up to date with the latest stable versions.
Read more...
Friday, December 16, 2011 7:46:38 PM
vlc, FLASH, gecko-mediaplayer, performance
...
I recently came across this little gem,
"Free Youtube!" UserJS.
Originally posted by Script Summary:
Install and then use YouTube as normal, only without the flash. Plays videos with your local FLV-capable media player. Also rewrites common YouTube embed codes to be links to the video page on YouTube.
Read more...
Friday, December 16, 2011 2:56:00 PM
plugins, SLACKWARE, totem, 13.37
The recent
OOPP Labs release currently works best with Totem for various multimedia pages (VLC plugin does not currently don't work in this build and gecko-mediaplayer has some issues). However, being a Gnome application and Slackware being fairly Gnome free means that Totem requires a little more work to install on Slackware.
However, it can be done, you just need a few packages outside of a typical Slackware install
Read more...
Friday, December 9, 2011 12:08:01 PM
11.60, color, 12.00, crash
...
We have had some reports following the 11.60 release of users having a crash on startup when they first run 11.60. A few users have been able to get Opera to run for a limited amount of time but noticed that all the colours are inverted, like this:
This issue is showing up for users running with a 16-bit colour depth. It seems that some changes that we made in preparation for future hardware acceleration in Opera 12.00 caused this breakage.
Read more...
Sunday, December 4, 2011 1:13:13 PM
parcellite, clipboard, clipboard managers
If you are hitting the problem of
Gnome or Unity styling being lost when shutting down Opera you may be looking at alternative clipboard managers. Personally I would recommend
Diodon (see the
previous post for how to install it). Diodon is a good choice because it is simple, yet powerful and integrates nicely with Unity and Gnome. Another alternative that is frequently mentioned is Parcellite, however this requires some manual tweaks to get it working nicely under Ubuntu. If this sounds like too much, stick with Diodon or look at one of the many other alternatives.
Read more...
Friday, December 2, 2011 10:56:58 PM
clipboard, gnome, unity, gnome-settings-daemon
...
The problem is that as Opera shuts down gnome-settings-daemon asks for the clipboard data that Opera holds. Something about the response causes gnome-settings-daemon to crash. The reason styling changes is that gnome-settings-daemon is also the program responsible for setting how Gnome and Unity look. When it crashes they fall back to the default Gtk style.
A little background on why gnome-settings-daemon cares about Opera's clipboard is probably required, for those of you thinking that this all sounds a little weird. The way that X11's clipboard works is that applications themselves own and manage clipboard contents. When another application wants to get the contents of the clipboard they ask the application that currently holds it. This also means that if the application that holds this data shuts down, the clipboard contents are typically lost. For example, if you copied some data in Opera you could paste it into any other application whilst Opera is running, without problems. However if you shut down Opera before pasting, it won't work. The easiest way to prevent this is to have a clipboard manager that takes over ownership of the clipboard, which is why gnome-settings-daemon has one built in.
So to work around this crash you can simply disable gnome-settings-daemon's clipboard manager. To do this, enter the following as your regular user in a terminal:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.clipboard active false
Read more...
Saturday, November 26, 2011 10:15:59 PM
xz-utils, compression, xzdec, TAR
...
Recent Opera snapshots are provided in xz compressed tar files. If xz is installed, GNU tar version 1.22 and above will be able to open these packages seamlessly (
XZ Utils is pre-installed on many recent distributions or can easily be obtained from their respective repositories). If you have an older version of tar you can still open xz compressed tar files (assuming xz is installed) as follows:
xzcat opera-11.60-1173.i386.linux.tar.xz | tar x
(Replace
"opera-11.60-1173.i386.linux.tar.xz" with the name of the actual Opera package you wish to extract).
Read more...
Sunday, October 30, 2011 10:15:00 PM
freebsd, unix, testing, linux
...
Ok, let me start by saying I don't have a clear focus for this particular blog post. Really these are just some thoughts swimming around my head, but since it is late on Sunday and there is nothing good to watch on TV I thought I'd type them up anyway.
Read more...
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 2:40:26 PM
Presto, core, snapshots
Someone asked me for this earlier today. I thought I'd repost it here for the curious
Read more...
Monday, October 24, 2011 3:44:54 PM
debian, archlinux, fedora, crash
...
You can work around this for now by creating a /etc/operaprefs_default.ini file that contains:
[File Selector]
Dialog Toolkit=4
This will disable Gtk styling support and hence avoid the issue. Once the bug is fixed by us or the Gtk team you can remove this workaround.
Monday, October 24, 2011 11:25:17 AM
repackage, archlinux, pkgbuild, 11.52
...
At the time I write this Opera has not been updated from 11.51 to 11.52 in the Arch Linux community repository. If you do not want to wait for this (
since it is a security update), you can use a PKGBUILD I provide to create a native package locally and use that to upgrade.
Read more...
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 8:21:35 PM
duckduckgo, dontbubble, ddg, donttrack
...
I'm sure most Opera fans are aware that we released an update to our stable browser today to fix a
security issue. And whilst that was the primary motivation for the release it didn't stop adding a hidden gem. My new favourite search engine,
DuckDuckGo was added to the pre-provided search engine list for English language users.
Read more...
Thursday, October 13, 2011 10:35:01 AM
themes, titlebar, decoration, opera
...
Today we released the
Opera 12.00 Alpha and with that our initial work on
hardware acceleration. However, that was not the only new feature we are showing off. The other was
Themes.
Unfortunately, the Linux/FreeBSD team were not ready with our initial Theme implementation in time for the Alpha. However, I wouldn't want you to think that it isn't well under way.
So here is a screen shot taken using an internal test build, showing off the Monster theme by Jon Hicks.
Read more...
Friday, October 7, 2011 10:51:17 AM
gstreamer, Packaging, opera, 12.00
...
I was recently looking around at Linux repositories that offer Opera and found one that listed kdelibs, qt, gtk+2, etc. as Opera dependencies. In fact Opera requires none of these to function!
Read more...
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 3:40:21 PM
pd, linux, freebsd, windows
...
Opera for Linux and FreeBSD has long had a command line switch called '-pd' that allows you to specify any directory as an Opera profile (settings) directory. This is handy as it means you can test multiple configurations from just one installation. As a side effect, it also make it very easy to simulate a clean install. Now as of Opera Next 12.00-1076, this feature has come to our other two desktop platforms!
Read more...
Monday, September 26, 2011 9:30:00 PM
sbopkg, simple, SLACKWARE, Dependencies
...
Since I have been running Slackware as my primary distro I've heard the occasional comment along the lines of, "Manual dependency management must be a real hassle" or worse, "How do you work without a package manager?". Rather than repeat my response ad nauseam individually to those asking such questions, I thought I would save myself the trouble and type up my thoughts once publicly, so that I could simply point them to this post.
Read more...
1 2 3 4 5 Next »
My Opera
