Tim Hardy

I’ve finally got round to posting my xf86config for the Compaq Armada 1540D.

While online with the machine, I decided to install something a little more user-friendly than lynx for web browsing. Now I know some people consider it heresy to install commercial software, but I had a play with Opera the other day and was impressed by its performance. Firefox is a fantastic browser but it is a slow starter and can be a CPU hog. Given the low-specs of this laptop, even a slight increase in performance makes a considerable difference. Opera has a smaller footprint too which is significant when you’ve only got a 2G harddrive. The decision was made.

The official Debian package from Opera had unmet dependencies so I downloaded the static rpm and created a .deb package with the following command:
fakeroot alien opera-8.0-20050415.1-static-qt.i386-en.rpm

Several minutes later I was presented with a .deb package easily installed with:
dpkg -i opera-8.0-20050415.1_i386.deb

The free version displays adverts in the title bar. You can chose images or google-provided text ads. I’ve opted for the latter and they’re not that distracting. If need be, my friend can pay for the commercial version and get rid of them but, as a struggling writer, he may be happier to save the money.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2005 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.