[conspire] Free Opera Reg. Codes Today Only! Plus Usage Hints

[Mark S Bilk]

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:

  http://my.opera.com/community/party/reg.dml

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

  http://www.opera.com/download/

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

  msb at linux:~/c> which opera
  opera is /usr/bin/opera
  msb at linux:~/c> 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 $1 /tmp/foomutt.html
  opera -remote "openURL(/tmp/foomutt.html,new-window)"

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