Redefining the CarPC

**justchat_1** · 10-04-2010, 05:21 PM

Traditionally a carPC in this community is thought to be an itx-sized x86 computer. Other then the form factor and power supply, very little differs between a carPC and a household PC. Up until recently, this was mainly limited by the fact that all carPC front ends ran on that architecture with the exception of building your own linux distro.

Enter openMobile...

Developers and Skin Designers can now design a skin or plugin once, on their favorite OS, package it up using openMobiles easy point-and-click Open Installer and deploy it to any openMobile installation running on any OS running on any architecture. No recompiling, no hacking, no separate packages, no building your own installers, just a nice simple platform-neutral plugin.

End users can install OpenMobile on anything from a quad-core 64bit PC....to an android phone...to a beagleboard...to a playstation 3...to almost any device they can imagine. OpenMobile provides all the benefits of platform neutral executables (.net/mono framework) with all the advantages of platform specific bindings. The result is that the framework (either our OSSpecific wrappers or HAL services) deals with the underlying operating system so that end users never have to.

Performance enthusiasts can feel confident knowing that their front end is taking full advantage of the hardware they purchased. OpenMobile uses hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics (and OpenMobile's green-nitrous rendering engine) to minimize power usage, maintain a snappy interface and keep the CPU free for other tasks (like next-gen speech recognition or streaming internet radio).

Families can take advantage of the savings per person that openMobile offers by purchasing a system that allows the kids in back to watch separate movies while you view weather and traffic information up front. Multi-zone support allows an unlimited number of different audio and video zones to keep everyone entertained.

**CohesiveTech** · 10-04-2010, 05:33 PM

Well stated Justin. OM is truly revolutionary. What you and the team have done is so bleeding edge that it is a new class onto itself.

**Bugbyte** · 10-04-2010, 08:55 PM

Just downloaded for OSX. Doesn't work - installs an exe file. [Edit: uninstaller just moves everything to a rollback folder but doesn't uninstall]

Where's the ARM version so I can try it out on my igepv2 under Ubuntu?

**red_parchel** · 10-04-2010, 09:43 PM

bb, I tried OM a few versions ago I had the same problem as you. you'll need to run it via mono which i believe is a c# runtime environment of some sort. so you have to download mono [and i believe to do so i needed OSX's Xtools] ... then you can run it from terminal as "mono /path/to/openmobile.exe" Same thing with linux .. you need mono ... but i have no idea about arm support. Arm is starting a little revolution around here and it's pretty awesome!

**tripzero** · 10-04-2010, 09:53 PM

it's a .net assembly not a binary. This means that it is cpu arch agnostic. You should be able to install mono on your ubuntu on your igep and run it. I'm going to give it a try as well. See how it performs on a low powered system like that.

**Bugbyte** · 10-04-2010, 10:13 PM

Ah! I get it - mono runs cross-platform, OM runs on mono. Check.

**RipplingHurst** · 10-04-2010, 10:43 PM

Mono? What a terrible name...argh.

I have decided to use my CF Minimalist skin graphics to OM as soon as I can. I am very hopeful OM will be the way of to go for me, specially on the skinning front. I'm not a coder, so can't wait to see what I can do. CF limitations are really making me banging my had in disbelief.

**justchat_1** · 10-04-2010, 10:54 PM

This is a few days in advance of 0.8 being released (only hint i'll give for the release is 42

so everythings not easily available. 0.7 works everywhere...0.8 has osx support disabled but still blows most things out of the water since its fully hardware accelerated.

You can grab the latest 0.8 trunk build here:
http://openmobile.sourceforge.net/main/trunk/