Opera OLPC edition

[Rob Savoye]

Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

> Yes, Opera supports the "netscape" plugin API. You can put plugins here:
>   /usr/lib/opera/plugins
> Also, we look for plugins here:
>   /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

  Cool, I'll give it a try. I hadn't thought it'd be that easy. :-)

> For example, you can put Adobe's latest Flash plugin for Linux:
> 
>   -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6904912 Jan 25 13:26 libflashplayer.so
> 
> It works, but the file size is less than inviting. Could you point me
> to a gnash plugin?

  It's included in Fedora extras, as well as Ubuntu, or grab the sources
from http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash. As the Gnash plugin uses shared
libraries (unlike the Adboe one), a dynamically linked Gnash plugin is
about 32k. A statically linked one with full sound & video support is
just under 2M. As embedded devices are our main focus for Gnash, we're
doing engineering to make the Flash player as small as possible, and to
run well on low end hardware. Our test platform is a 100Mhz ARM with 64M.

> Ideally, though, I'd like to keep Flash content away from OLPC
> machines. Flash is a proprietary format and we should rather find open
> alternatives. For example, you can add sound to web pages through a
> JavaScript API. Try this page in Opera on the OLPC:

  We've reverse engineered Flash, and written a clean room
implementation that's currently SWF v7 compatible. Currently work to
make streaming video (ala YouTube) work, plus extending Gnash to be
fully SWF v9 compatible is in progress. Most of us on the Gnash team
hated Flash as well, but hate proprietary formats more, so instead of
just complaining, we wrote our own to free up Flash technology. Another
thing is that Gnash also can use free codecs like Ogg and Theora in
addition to the proprietary ones.

	- rob -