Opera 10.5 For Linux: What We Know
Yesterday, Opera 10.5 pre-alpha (codenamed Evenes) was released as a special gift to the small but dedicated fan base. It definitely had everyone talking.You can find our review of Opera 10.5 here. In short, Evenes is fast – really fast. It not only came close to Safari and Chrome’s JavaScript rendering speed but also defeated them in most of the benchmarks. Unfortunately the pre-alpha build was released only for Windows and Mac, leaving Linux users high and dry. But, this doesn’t mean that Opera Software has forgotten about UNIX users.
Yesterday, Opera software didn’t release a UNIX build of Evenes simply because, it wasn’t polished enough to be usable. Opera has long been criticized due to the lack of a native interface for UNIX and Mac. With Opera 10.5 for Mac, the developers have tried to address this issue by switching to the Cocoa framework. Similar treatment is planned for the Linux build too.
With Evenes, Opera Software will be ditching the QT framework. Yes, you would no longer need to have QT libraries installed in order to use Opera. This is expected to make Opera smaller and faster.
Opera 10.5 will be using X Window (X11) drawing primitives. However, it will also support native styling for both Gnome and KDE. The KDE build isn’t yet ready but we do have a few screenshots for GNOME users.
Opera 10.20 for UNIX
Opera 10.50 for UNIX
Opera 10.50 for UNIX with GTK Native Styling
So, when will Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for Linux be released? When it’s ready.
Ihavenone
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:59 pm #
“Opera has long been criticized due to the lack of a native interface for UNIX and Mac.”
Do you know of any browser that is as much integrated as Opera in Windows/Mac/Gtk/Qt/… ???
[Reply]
Pallab De Reply:
December 24th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Just see the 2nd screenshot (the one from Opera 10.2) to get an idea about what people have been complaining about and compare it to the final screenshot.
Firefox has provided a true native interface (atleast on Linux) for a long time.
.-= Pallab De´s last blog ..Fix Common Windows 7 and Vista Problems with FixWin =-.
[Reply]
Rafael
December 23rd, 2009 at 6:53 pm #
Beautiful, I can’t wait for this build to come to my Mandriva Linux!
[Reply]
Hector Macias Ayala
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:39 pm #
From your screenshots I can tell they are from ruario, he is a very active member in the opera desktop team, you can find him commenting regularly in that blog.
.-= Hector Macias Ayala´s last blog ..Hasta nunca Google, bienvenido WordPress =-.
[Reply]
Pallab De Reply:
December 24th, 2009 at 12:50 am
Yes indeed. Ruari was kind enough to help me out with this article.
.-= Pallab De´s last blog ..New Antivirus Shootouts – Avira AntiVir Is the Lightest; Norton & Kaspersky Most Effective =-.
[Reply]
kors
December 25th, 2009 at 1:46 am #
X Window, dammit!
[Reply]
Pallab De Reply:
December 25th, 2009 at 4:10 am
fixed.
.-= Pallab De´s last blog ..Fix Common Windows 7 and Vista Problems with FixWin =-.
[Reply]
p Reply:
July 9th, 2010 at 9:15 pm
No, it’s just “X”.
The full name is “The X Window System, Version 11″. In other words, it’s a window system (a system that displays windows) named X, which is currently at version 11.
Compare it to the Opera web browser: it’s a web browser called Opera, not a browser called “Opera web”.
[Reply]
Me
January 6th, 2010 at 11:15 am #
“Unfortunately the pre-alpha build was released only for Windows and Mac, leaving Linux users high and dry. But, this doesn’t mean that Opera Software has forgotten about UNIX users.”
Yes, it doesn’t mean that UNIX users were entirely forgotten, since the last versions of Mac OS X are UNIX certified.
But Linux is not UNIX. And perhaps never will be.
[Reply]
David R.
January 7th, 2010 at 5:11 pm #
I have just installed Opera 10.10.4742 on my original x-box running 2.4.31 kernel. I needed the libqt3c102-mt as a dependency. Since the most recent firefox from Sarge repos was ver 1. something, I fugure this would be better. It seems very responsive on the cely 700 w/ 64MB of ram. Thank you Opera!
[Reply]
David R. Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
I just noticed that there were no sarge or older repositories for opera updates any more.
http://deb.opera.com/
Well, at least I have a working version of 10.10
[Reply]