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The Future of Glovebox

The middle of last year, I started working on Glovebox, a rather ambitious project for a car computer environment.

One of the biggest choices I made was to write my own set of UI libraries on top of Qt to mirror the kind of integration that KDE has. This was mostly because I didn’t want to drag in the few hundred MB needed for Plasma.

Wow, that past me was an idiot. Lets all point and laugh.

Ever since Plasma got moved into kdelibs, I’ve been thinking on and off about building Glovebox on top of KDE. For some reason over the past few weeks I started thinking more seriously about it.

At any rate, I’ve decided to go ahead and do that. I’ve also thought about another good idea. I’ll allow Glovebox’s UI to run under an X server in addition to the original idea of using Qt Embedded’s framebuffer stuff.

So most of tonight will be spent hacking the build system and Launchpad into shape, followed by restructuring the page plugin system to use KParts.

Announcing: Glovebox, your in-car assistant!

For most of the summer, I spent my limited idle time thinking up what kind of big project I wanted to accomplish next, now that my MythTV system was ticking along just fine. My Hiveminder list had a few notable things in it: a beowulf cluster of as many free, discarded computers as I can find, a dorm computer that acts as a link between my dorm and home network, a networked coffee maker, and a car computer. Just to name a few crazy ideas.

All of those others would take too much effort, or have already been done before hundreds of times. The linux car computer hasn’t though. Searching google yields one result, “The Coolest Car in the World“. Really, its nicely done. But it could use some improvements. At a quick glance, most of the package seems hacked together using bits of MythTV, Gentoo, various other programs, and shell scripts. Even though it works, it is still very much a huge hack.

So I started my own project. A car computing environment. Much like a desktop environment such as KDE, or Gnome, Glovebox is a ‘desktop’ environment of sorts. It is based in Qt/Embedded Linux, which unfortunately restricts all GUIs to use that, but I feel the benefit of the lightweightness far outweighs anything gained by using a heavy X server.

The project is currently hosted by GitHub, and can be found on it’s page there. More details about the project can be found on that page as well. But for now, how about some screenshots, eh?

This first shot here shows Marble from the KDE project. In Qt/Embedded. As I said in yesterday’s post, I was planning on using it for some big upcoming project. Here it is! Right now, all the map does is sit there and look pretty. More like pretty awesome, am I right? Oh ho ho ho…

Since the Services concept in Launchpad (the main menu program) is based off of plasma’s DataEngine system, I figured it’d be a good idea to continue the tradition of using a clock as the whipping boy. The first Service I wrote was the time service, and the first page to use a service was the clock page. Once I add themes to the system, the clock will look a lot nicer.

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