Free Opera Reg. Codes Today 830 Only! Plus Usage Hints

To celebrate their 10-year anniversary, Opera is giving away free activation codes for their browser, including for Linux x86-PPC-Sparc, FreeBSD, Mac, and some unmentionable OS's. Just register with your e-mail address here and you get the codes on the resulting web page:

Then just download the software -- the Linux version is customized for 13 different distros plus generic statically linked deb and rpm versions:

The Opera browser is closed source, but it gets good reviews and might come in handy for something.

Well, it comes in handy for seg-faulting. I installed the version they give for SuSE 9.2 (the latest they show -- I'm running 9.3):

opera-8.02-20050727.5-shared-qt.i386-en.rpm

opera isusr-bin-opera Segmentation fault

Hmm...

However, the statically linked generic rpm version (which still requires a number of libraries) does work:

opera-8.02-20050727.1-static-qt.i386-en.rpm

And it does take the registration code I got from the website, eliminating ads. First thing to do is go into the preferences and set the fonts for toolbars, dialogs, etc., to something larger than the default; Adobe Helvetica 16 pt. works nicely for a 1600x1200 19" screen and 60 year old eyes.

Opera's fonts are slightly jaggy compared to Firefox, which I normally use. But it is faster than Firefox, and I've found a use for it.

The mutt mailer needs a browser to render HTML segments, and it needs to come up fast. Firefox takes 5 seconds, but Opera takes only 3! (On an AMD Athlon XP 2800+.)

My .mailcap entry is:

text-html; opm %s; nametemplate=%s.html

And ~-bin-opm is:

#!-bin-bash cp $1tmp-foomutt.html opera -remote "openURL(-tmp-foomutt.html,new-window)"

Replace "opera" with "firefox" in the last line to run that browser.

Mark S Bilk