Opera Mini full-screen on your One! Save time and data

This is great. I'm fairly new to Linux - I have dabbled in the past but gave up when I borked my wireless networking. I bought an Aspire One yesterday so I'm getting back into my stride now!

Saw this http://my.opera.com/larskl/blog/2008/03/29/opera-mini-in-1280-1024 and decided to try it out on my Linpus Aspire One. It will work just as well on XP/Vista, and as you probably already have Sun Java installed you can skip the first step.

Step 1 (Linpus only) - install Sun Java - I followed this guide here - http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/09/installing-sun-java-on-acer-aspire-one.html. The built in IcedTea Java VM is not very good apparently.

Step 2 (any OS from now on) - Download Microemulator which runs inside Sun Java - http://microemu.org - from here http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=30014. The file will need to be unpacked somewhere.

Step 3 - Download Opera Mini itself - Generic Advanced MIDP2 version - from here http://www.operamini.com/download/pc/generic/generic_advanced_midp_2/. You need both the .jad and the .jar file and you must keep them together for use later.

Step 4 - Browse to the location of the microemulator.jar file downloaded and unpacked in Step 2 and double-click it to launch it.

Step 5 - When Microemulator has lanched, click the Options menu and choose Select Device.

Step 6 - On the Select Device dialogue box, click "Add" then browse to the folder where you unpacked the microemulator download and select microemu-device-resizable.jar. After adding the Resizable Device, make sure you set it as Default to save time in future.

Step 7 - Make it full screen! Drag the bottom-right hand corner of Microemulator to set the size of the device - there's no need to hit the "Resize" button and enter numbers unless you really want to (be careful if you do enter numbers, I made mine too tall for the screen by not taking the title bar and task bar fully into account, and had a pain getting it back on screen)

Step 8 - In Microemulator, Choose File - Open JAD file and browse to the Opera Mini .jad file you downloaded earlier.

Now enjoy fast, cheap full-screen browsing! I've only got 1GB per month on my 3G data card so I'm chuffed with this set up, a little data goes a long long way with Opera Mini...

I'm sure that improvements can be made to these steps, for example launching Microemulator and Opera Mini together without having to do Step 8 every time, I'm all ears!

Enjoy...

 

The usage instructions ( link ) say that "java -jar microemulator.jar (MIDlet jad file)" will launch the "midlet" from the command line

so a little script like the one below should work:

#!/bin/sh
java -jar /path/to/microemulator.jar /path/to/opera-mini-advanced.jad

if you saved that script as opera-mini in your home directory and made it executable then from a terminal window a simple ./opera-mini would launch it all for you.
If anyone reading this needs more info on how to do that then just let me know.

 

Thanks for this information, this will be awesome when I am browsing at Edge speeds!

I wasn't able to get the launcher script to work though - whenever I restart Microemulator, Opera Mini is not in the list. But if I go to File - Recent MIDlets it is in there, and I can launch it fairly quickly. If I could get that going it would be great, but if not, I am still a happy camper, so thanks.

 

I should have put a caveat in my last post: I have not actually tried this myself. I wrote that after reading the docs!
The little script I posted should launch both the emulator and opera-mini. If it doesn't then I'll install them and debug what is happening.