Thread: Ubuntu as a car PC

ok so i installed hardy and lo and behold everything worked perfectly. i was able to follow the directions and it all just fell into place. so thank you for all your help. so now i just have one final question. i installed the moblin-clutter-home package but i don't know how to get it to switch over to it. any suggestions?

EDIT: so i ran desktop-launcher from the command line and that successfully launched the clutter desktop, however is there a way to have that be the default? currently if i close the terminal it will kill the clutter desktop. Also is there a way to customize the position of the icons in the clutter desktop? i.e which icons show up in the bottom row of icons

once again sorry for being so needy here, but if you can help i would greatly appreciate it.

ok so i asked this awhile back and got no response. i have looked just about everywhere for the answer to no avail. i have the ubuntu-mobile/ hildon desktop installed running the default skin. i downloaded the clutter desktop, and can launch it from the command-line, but my question is how to default to this skin within the hildon desktop? anybody out there have any ideas?

Natedawgg: I've gone to the link in your sig and tried to figure out where to download your proggie and what it is. When I get to your download page, you give instructions about Adobe air and only the Windows and OSX requirements, but the download is for Linux. That's a little confusing right off, but cool, no problem, I'm not a newb so I just ignore it.

Get everything downloaded and install Adobe Air AFTER having to right click, permissions, allow execute as program. no problems there...

Then your instructions say to download NASair and extract it, but your instructions say:

****INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS****
3. obviously unzip said zip file. you should be left with MediaCar.air
4. double click to install. it will give you a standardish install wizard, painless really.

Um... no... I'm left with NAS1_5.air, but Hey... no problem... I can do this!!! I'm not about to let this thing get the better of me.... I double click the file and it opens with archive extractor. Again, I'm no newb so I right click and chose open with, but can't find adobe air in the list of programs. I never get an install wizard!

So... now I'm running through menus trying to find the Adobe Air Installer, finally find it, load the file, get the program running, it looks beautiful, but no sound and it won't even open any mp3's.

Is the program too alpha to run anything yet?

Thanks though for all your hard work. It really does look great.
Using Ubuntu Intrepid

first off my apologies for the incomplete instructions. the app was originally written for OSX and win users ( i had not used linux enough to feel comfortable announcing that it for sure would all work on linux) since then i have been diving into the world of linux (love it by the way) and have started trying to make sure that my app would indeed work. for the most part it does, but i failed to update the instructions and i apologize.

at this point the app is very much alpha for linux. i am having problems loading the external xml files that are needed for the app to run correctly.

let me ask you, after you select the folder that contains your music ( should be the innermost folder that holds all of you music files ) and double click said folder, do you get a list of all of your albums/artists/songs? or are you getting a screen with only controls for playing the music?

once again i apologize for confusion. i am glad to hear some sort feedback. i am able to get the app running on my machine, but it hard for me to know what other users are experiencing. so hopefully i can make this all work better for everybody else. i will get work on these issues and see i can knock them all out. if you want pm me and i can send you a direct build that should work better.

Originally Posted by natedawgg

first off my apologies for the incomplete instructions. the app was originally written for OSX and win users ( i had not used linux enough to feel comfortable announcing that it for sure would all work on linux) since then i have been diving into the world of linux (love it by the way) and have started trying to make sure that my app would indeed work. for the most part it does, but i failed to update the instructions and i apologize.

at this point the app is very much alpha for linux. i am having problems loading the external xml files that are needed for the app to run correctly.

let me ask you, after you select the folder that contains your music ( should be the innermost folder that holds all of you music files ) and double click said folder, do you get a list of all of your albums/artists/songs? or are you getting a screen with only controls for playing the music?

once again i apologize for confusion. i am glad to hear some sort feedback. i am able to get the app running on my machine, but it hard for me to know what other users are experiencing. so hopefully i can make this all work better for everybody else. i will get work on these issues and see i can knock them all out. if you want pm me and i can send you a direct build that should work better.

Hi Natedawgg,

With all the hard work you do on your program, the instructions can come later. You do good work so be proud of what you have already accomplished!!!! Like I said, I'm not "unfamiliar" with linux so it was easy for me to figure out what to do. Others may not be so lucky though...

You asked about when I select the directory for music... That was a good question back to me. When I select the directory, no music shows up at all. Nothing. Not the subdirectories, music, playlists, nothing. It's as if the directory doesn't exist. When I check through the directory listing manually (from command line cd /music, ls, it all shows up). I don't get any screen at all... it just keeps looking for the music. I've even let it run for an hour (I had other things to do so I just let it look thinking maybe it needed to build a database or something), but nothing happened at all. No screen, just that round thing going in circles looking for files.

I hope my first post didn't offend you. I tend to have a very dry sense of humor and was trying to be funny. My apologies if it didn't work.

Again, from what I can see... Good work!!!!

Originally Posted by kjnelan

Um... no... I'm left with NAS1_5.air, but Hey... no problem... I can do this!!! I'm not about to let this thing get the better of me.... I double click the file and it opens with archive extractor. Again, I'm no newb so I right click and chose open with, but can't find adobe air in the list of programs. I never get an install wizard!

So... now I'm running through menus trying to find the Adobe Air Installer, finally find it, load the file, get the program running, it looks beautiful, but no sound and it won't even open any mp3's.

ok so i did a fresh install of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on a vm so i could try to replicate your problem. i found that if i did a straight download of the zip file without having adobe air installed you will not get the install wizard, instead you get a list of compiled swfs and other random files. you have to have both adobe flash and adobe air installed for everything to work correctly. im sorry if that was not clear upfront ( i am in the process of revamping the instructions to include these steps ). after i installed adobe air and then double clicked the NAS1_5.air file i got the installer. and everything worked just fine. let me know if you are still having issue and i will be glad to help in any way that i can.

Originally Posted by kjnelan

Hi Natedawgg,

With all the hard work you do on your program, the instructions can come later. You do good work so be proud of what you have already accomplished!!!! Like I said, I'm not "unfamiliar" with linux so it was easy for me to figure out what to do. Others may not be so lucky though...

You asked about when I select the directory for music... That was a good question back to me. When I select the directory, no music shows up at all. Nothing. Not the subdirectories, music, playlists, nothing. It's as if the directory doesn't exist. When I check through the directory listing manually (from command line cd /music, ls, it all shows up). I don't get any screen at all... it just keeps looking for the music. I've even let it run for an hour (I had other things to do so I just let it look thinking maybe it needed to build a database or something), but nothing happened at all. No screen, just that round thing going in circles looking for files.

I hope my first post didn't offend you. I tend to have a very dry sense of humor and was trying to be funny. My apologies if it didn't work.

Again, from what I can see... Good work!!!!

trust me no offense was taken. i alwasy appreciate constructive criticism or just plain criticism, as it will help me in the long run the product better.

ok to the problem. this has been something i have been running into myself. to clairfy, you are able to navigate to the music folder directly, inside the app itself, correct? and after double clicking the folder that contains your music nothing appears. if this is the case then this an issue with my app not getting the correct file paths, and somehting that i am currently working on. if this is not the case there are a few things you can try to get it up and running.

first off look in you documents folder. if NASair was able to locate your music it should have written out an XML file named TuneLibraryXML.xml. if this file is there try opening it up with any text editor and looking through the file. if everything is correct inside the file you should see something like this:

<Library>
<Artist ArtistName="Artist">
<Album AlbumName="Album">
<Song SongName="songName.mp3" SongPath="path/to/your/music/folder/songName.mp3" SongType="mp3"/>
</Album>
</Artist>
</Library>

obviously this would be much much longer depending on your music collection, but this is the basic layout of the xml. if you see the <Library> node repeated over and over, then please let me know as this is a problem with the way NASair writes out the file (hopefully this is not the case).

if for some reason the xml file does not look correct or is empty delete it, go back into NASair, in the preference page (the page where you would select your music folder, or press the button that 3 small squares and 4 bars). from in this area press the "clear saved state" button.

by deleting the xml file and pressing this button you are essentially setting NASair back to a virgin state, in which NASair knows nothing about your system whatsoever.

now you can try to select your music folder again to see if it was just a quirk, or if there is something deeper.

let me know if this makes any sense or if it even helps.

Originally Posted by natedawgg

trust me no offense was taken. i alwasy appreciate constructive criticism or just plain criticism, as it will help me in the long run the product better.

ok to the problem. this has been something i have been running into myself. to clairfy, you are able to navigate to the music folder directly, inside the app itself, correct? and after double clicking the folder that contains your music nothing appears. if this is the case then this an issue with my app not getting the correct file paths, and somehting that i am currently working on. if this is not the case there are a few things you can try to get it up and running.

first off look in you documents folder. if NASair was able to locate your music it should have written out an XML file named TuneLibraryXML.xml. if this file is there try opening it up with any text editor and looking through the file. if everything is correct inside the file you should see something like this:

<Library>
<Artist ArtistName="Artist">
<Album AlbumName="Album">
<Song SongName="songName.mp3" SongPath="path/to/your/music/folder/songName.mp3" SongType="mp3"/>
</Album>
</Artist>
</Library>

obviously this would be much much longer depending on your music collection, but this is the basic layout of the xml. if you see the <Library> node repeated over and over, then please let me know as this is a problem with the way NASair writes out the file (hopefully this is not the case).

Okay... I did a fresh install AFTER deleting and resinstalling Adobe Air. (Flash has always been on my system so I'm sure that's not an issue.) I went back through the trying to find music in my /music folder and again nothing. It just hangs there as if it has no clue there is music there. (As a test I only put 4 files and 1 director with 4 files so the finding of things should have been fairly quick. they are mp3's.)

Originally Posted by natedawgg

by deleting the xml file and pressing this button you are essentially setting NASair back to a virgin state, in which NASair knows nothing about your system whatsoever.

Now that's a good thing to know. I'll print that out for future reference. Thanks for all your help!

Originally Posted by kjnelan

I went back through the trying to find music in my /music folder and again nothing. It just hangs there as if it has no clue there is music there. (As a test I only put 4 files and 1 director with 4 files so the finding of things should have been fairly quick. they are mp3's.)

this is very odd indeed. i never experienced anything like this. typically it is very fast at finding the music and writing out the xml file. on my system i have over 10gb of music with over 200 albums and it only takes literally 2-3 seconds to write out the file. it seems to me that NASair is not able to read the file system for some strange reason. this doesn't really seem right seeing as it lets you navigate to your music folder and then just cant find anything inside.

just a side thought. in order for NASair to know what album and what artist a song belongs to, the music folder needs to be arranged as so:
music/
artis/album/song
artist/album/song

at this point i cannot read the id3 tags to figure this all out automatically (one draw back to using flash) so that is why this has be set up this way.

check to make sure that this is the case. also, i know i mentioned this before but is it ever making it to the point where you have an TuneLibraryXML file in your documents folder?