Linux Frontends

I thought I'd create a thread with a list of frontends. They are rare, but they do exist. Here are some:

Headunit (mediacar clone):
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/other-cool-front-ends/28885-headunit-linux-windows-carpc-frontend-initial-screenshots.html

MythTV (Meant for TV's, but I've used it in the car too. No mouse support! Only keyboard and remote controls):
http://www.mythtv.org/

Freevo (I have not tried this one, but it is very similar to mythtv):
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/


Please, keep them coming!

To this list, please add:

DashPC - http://www.dashpc.com/
PyCar - http://pymedia.org/pycar/index.html

Geexbox www.geexbox.org

Just found this but haven't tried yet.
Theres also a temp page for ctrlMedia

Also found another app called DFBCar, but this is a very early release

Just in case anyone is interested..

See my post in the general discussion forum if you want to know about my project, I am the 1965 Mustang guy.

Spend this weekend working on the software part, took the headunit code and made the non-functional buttons work. Nothing fancy here, just rigged the buttons for radio, launcher and gps to start external executables. So the interface is a lot more functional.
After playing with it a bit I am not happy with the overall look/feel of the frontend so I will probably not use it. But if anyone is interested in the updated code let me know.

I am a big user of MythTV, started working on that next.. Objective is to make the interface work on a touchscreen for the main buttons and add voice support (festival) to provide information on menu location. Also want to voice enable (again festival) the weather module and write a "module" menu and submenu for GPSDrive, RoadMap and other external executables.

Any ideas ? anyone else done any of this work?

Rob

OK, started with the cool stuff....

As I have gotten a bit of interest from the community, I'll keep everyone updated.

Created a new module for MythTV, added menu's, updated the theme, reverse engineered some code.

This is what I have so far ;-)

Updated the info menu of Myth to have an option for Navigator (the module I am writing is mythNavigator)..
When selected it displays an warning message..
Then a menu that allow you to start GPSDrive, Roadmap and a GPS program.. I can easily change this to run whatever I want and add/remove buttons.

The big problem at this point.. I can't seem to display text.. I want to write a client app for GPSD but can only do graphical stuff, nothing text.....aaahhh... of well I'll figure it out.

I have attached some screenshots..

Rob

I started using eboxy, but since my skills the The GIMP or Photoshop stink I gave it up. Eboxy is cool because it has IR control builtin (steering wheel controls), is 100% modular, and runs on linux. The modular part of Eboxy is extremely awesome. By modular I mean that each element on a skin is separate and the backend logic to "do something" is separate. For example, the background, and the graphics for each button are specified independently. Unlike most skins, this means that if you don't want/have an XM radio a non-programmer can easily edit the XML skin file and remove the button. The backend components are also modular, so the user can pick which MP3 browser to use, which mp3 player to use, which movie player to use, etc. Eboxy itself doesn't do anything except specify a user interface, and how that user interface interacts with modules. Modules are usually just simple wrappers around an existing software library. If I could create nice graphics I would still be using it.

I started a skin file config file that had MP3, CD, Radio, DVD, and Settings buttons. I then wrote a plugin to maintain state, so that the last used mode would be saved whenever the mode was changed, and restored when eboxy was restarted. I wired up this module to the skin file. I wrote 90% of a module to control the D-Link FM radio, and started wiring it up when I realized how ugly it was going to look without a graphic artist to help out. After posting a couple of pleas for help here on mp3car.com, I gave up and reluctangly switched to windows XP.

If anyone is interested, I can share the skin and the code I wrote.

--Craig

Holy crap, I thought FEs on Windows were bad. The Linux ones are far, far far worse.

Oh what to do.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ddn

Holy crap, I thought FEs on Windows were bad. The Linux ones are far, far far worse.

Oh what to do.

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Hmmm, Quit complaining ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ddn

Holy crap, I thought FEs on Windows were bad. The Linux ones are far, far far worse.

Oh what to do.

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Code your own? :)