LinuxICE the In Car Entertainment Operating System: Beta1

kev000 · 10-14-2007, 01:03 AM

What? An operating system designed for the CarPC? Sound too good to be true? Well it isn't! LinuxICE is a full featured CarPC operating system designed specifically for Car Entertainment. At only 276MB, LinuxICE aims to include all the things you would need in a CarPC and nothing* you don't want.

Latest Version: Beta1 (Jan 5, 2008)
Features:

Free Open Source
Customized Desktop designed for touchscreens
Built-in Frontend application (nGhost Media Center)
Integrated Desktop with icepanel a server, carpc specific panel.
Uses Ubuntu Linux and LinuxICE software repositories to give you access to thousands of useful and free applications and updates
LiveCD with Installer - run it without installing it, or install it easily if you want it.
Built in drivers for touchscreens, gps devices, motherboards and many other components.

Screenshots:
LinuxICE Desktop:

nGhost Media Center:

Download

Find more info at the LinuxICE website where you can find more info and screenshots.

LinuxICE, where CarPCs are going...

2k1Toaster · 10-14-2007, 01:13 AM

approximately how fast are the boot times on some known system?

kev000 · 10-14-2007, 10:27 AM

Minus the time the bios sucks up, 15sec resume times are not uncommon. Cold boot can take up to 28+ seconds. (both times are from an epia M-9000, 256mb RAM)

Kernel optimization is always possible. The stock LinuxICE kernel is a slightly modified ubuntu one. This is good because it has support for a wider range of hardware drivers built in. Its bad because it makes booting slightly slower. We want to eventually put more hardware specific kernels in the repository for people to easily install after the fact. These will be kernels optimized for epias and other specific carPC hardware.

jswalls110 · 10-19-2007, 08:33 AM

Any other way to get this? The torrent has no seeds.....

Oops, never mind. I found it. Duhhhhhhhh. Sorry.

ambush276 · 10-20-2007, 11:34 PM

this sounds great just 1 question, phone support. If i get a bluetooth dongel, what phone program can i use/ what drivers/ i use verizon. etc etc...

astrapc · 10-23-2007, 01:32 PM

I want to know how any of my touch screen software - drivers for the motherboard etc will work if they are all designed for windows interface.

Is it possible to just install this and not windows?

Whatabout gps software and the gps mouse receiver?

kev000 · 10-23-2007, 03:26 PM

Quote:

this sounds great just 1 question, phone support. If i get a bluetooth dongel, what phone program can i use/ what drivers/ i use verizon. etc etc...

bluetooth is a young area in linux but a lot of progress has been made by nokia, intel, and some other companies. It may take some work, but I bet you could get whatever you needed to to work. I haven't tried any handsfree stuff yet.

Quote:

I want to know how any of my touch screen software - drivers for the motherboard etc will work if they are all designed for windows interface.

Is it possible to just install this and not windows?

Whatabout gps software and the gps mouse receiver?

LinuxICE has built in touchscreen drivers with calibration software so you'll have no problem there. It also has built in drivers for your motherboard, vga, sound, ethernet, etc. Most drivers are already detected and installed automatically in Linux.

LinuxICE includes what is called GPSd which is used to connect to gps recievers (usb and serial). For GPS applications you can use Navit, RoadNav, GPSDrive, or even iGuidance (under win32 emulation).

Just a little update on boot times: LinuxICE now has a new boot loading program (aka GRUB with the intel-moblin fast-boot patch) in its software repository that should cut resume times by a fair amount (it resumes directly from the boot loader by-passing the kernel decompressing/loading).

some things are going to be a challenge for people new to Linux. But we are working on making that easier and making things "just work".

astrapc · 10-23-2007, 05:58 PM

so if i download and burn that iso image file to a disc, then run that on boot from cd rom - whether i have windows installed or not, that will wipe my system and install linuxice...and from there i should be able to get up and running???

It all seems a lot more simple.....I just want to check the theory??? be great to have a system that pretty much boots instantly

nst6563 · 10-23-2007, 10:42 PM

I d/l this tonight and ran it in a virtual machine on my home pc. I must say, I did expect a faster boot time and NOT have to login via a console in order to get to the screens posted.

my home PC is a 2.8Ghz AMD Opteron w/3Gb ram and a Seagate 320Gb 16mb cache SATAII drive. Booting this OS/Frontend took longer in the virtual machine than it did to boot windows with the same virtual machine config. I'm also running Linux on the home system.

With a little work though... I think this could be quite a nice frontend option

:EDIT: did some reading (helps sometimes) and found that you need to run the ICE Install after you restart from the "Install to hdd". I think this should either be automated as a first run item on restart or put a fat message up so that people like me that didn't read the FAQ/Wiki first will know. --btw...am I missing something with the "slow" booting? it's not that slow, but I did expect faster than a stripped version of XP.

kev000 · 10-24-2007, 12:31 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by astrapc

so if i download and burn that iso image file to a disc, then run that on boot from cd rom - whether i have windows installed or not, that will wipe my system and install linuxice...and from there i should be able to get up and running???

It all seems a lot more simple.....I just want to check the theory??? be great to have a system that pretty much boots instantly

Yes, you can run this by booting from the cdrom. You can test around with it from there (the livecd is a fully functional OS) and then you can install it which can wipe your system. You can also opt to resize your winxp partition via the installer and dual boot xp and linuxice.

As for the "slow" booting. The kernel that Linuxice has is a "vanilla" kernel from ubuntu. We are currently working on a customized epia kernel which should boot _much_ faster. It's in the "unstable" Linuxice repository right now. however, I wouldn't recommend testing it if you don't know much about Linux. LinuxICE Beta1 will hopefully include a few more tweaks to get it to boot faster. We'll get those bugs ironed out for Beta1.

Thanks for the feedback

nst6563 · 10-24-2007, 12:40 PM

so then I assume I could use ubuntu sources and build my own kernel and probably speed up the boot time?

kev000 · 10-24-2007, 02:38 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by nst6563

so then I assume I could use ubuntu sources and build my own kernel and probably speed up the boot time?

yes you could. or you could even get the vanilla kernel sources from kernel.org and built a much newer and faster kernel

.

this may help

nst6563 · 10-24-2007, 02:49 PM

I'll give that a shot then. I have Ubuntu 7.04 right now on this machine (as well as Vista and XP Pro). My Carpc is a P4 3.06Ghz w/256mb ram (used to have 1gb, but due to boot time issues I use hibernation with a small amount of ram) and 5400rpm 2.5" ide drive.

If I build a specific kernel for my setup and it does indeed improve boot-times then I think I'd switch to LinuxICE as long as the GPS was up to "par" with what's available now (or just run it through WINE).

nice job on what's done so far though

lopan · 11-25-2007, 01:44 PM

This looks pretty nice, are there any plans for XM support?

Also, does anyone know if this will work with the Via NX nano motherboards?

kev000 · 11-25-2007, 11:09 PM

Sorry mate, there are currently no plans for XM integration. There doesn't seem to be any support for Linux from the XM folks.

It should work out of the box with your NX nano board. If you are using wifi, make sure that your card is supported under Linux. We created 3 epia centric kernels that resume in about 11s for CIII, C3-2, and C7 cpus. I'd be interested to see how well it runs on a nano board or even a pico board.

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