Opera Beta for Debian on SL 7

It works fine on Scientific Linux 7. Instead of holding your hand, I’ll tell you how I worked it out.

Get the package from here. It’s for 64-bit only right now. Since all the current 7.x series for RHEL/CentOS/SL is 64-bit only (CentOS team claims to be working on a 32-bit), if you are running one of them, you should have no trouble.

I opted to run it from my home directory. It’s easier to update that way. It comes in a DEB package format, but any of the archive tools should easily open it. I used Engrampa and extracted it in a separate “opera” folder. All you really need is the zipped data.tar.xz part. From the CLI, I ran unxz and then untarred it. What you get is a set of folders to match typical installation on most Debian Linux systems. However, I moved them all as they were in that “opera” folder into my home directory.

Given this is not written for any of the RHEL clones, I knew I needed to test it on the CLI to get back useful errors. Drop down into the localized “/usr/bin” folder and find opera-beta and launch thus: ./opera-beta.

The first error was regarding libcrypto. It’s coded to look for a specific version and we only need to use a symlink for this. As root, create a symlink: /usr/lib64/libcrypto.so.1.0.1e > /usr/lib64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0. Try again and you’ll get a complaint about libudev. Just use the cues provided to see what to name your symlink. This is going to work just fine.

The next attempt to launch gets a complaint about the sandbox in Opera-beta: It needs to be owned by root and have 4755 permissions. Make it so; on my machine that worked out like this (as root):

chown root:root /home/ed/opera/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera-beta/opera_sandbox
chmod 4755 /home/ed/opera/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opera-beta/opera_sandbox

After that, it ran very nicely. It creates it’s own new config in your ~./.config and caches in ~/.cache. Now you can create a desktop launcher and make sure it’s marked as a binary.