Car PC….

Ever heard of a Car PC? Carputer? anything along those lines? well i guess its bigger overseas than it is here.

Anyway I installed a computer in my car!… yes yes.. i know.. your going like WTF! rite now.. Actually I had this installed somewhere back in 2007 i think… seems like ages ago. But the hard disk crashed on me and i never found the heart to spend the cash get a new one…

well because of my ingenious idea I now can:

• Watch movies/Video clips/Series/Divx

• listen to songs (right now i have 4360 songs on the play list)

So time to show you what it looks like currently.

This goes under my seat.. its an old Pentium III from a book PC. So its ridiculously small but powerful enough to run the things I need. Yes I know.. I still have to build a custom casing for it.

This is where the magic happens…. The power converter allows me to use my car battery to power up the CPU.

And this is where the screen sits in the car… sadly not a touch screen yet.

Close up of the screen. I play MP3’s using winamp…

So now you see what i’m talking about…

future enhancements include:

• DVD player

• Touchscreen built into dashboard

• Wi-fi card (internet on the move)

• GPS system

When am I going to make these enhancements?? hahaha i don’t know.. but hopefully I don’t sit on the idea too long

Ubuntu who?

Ever heard of it?? no… well it’s a freeware OS built on Linux. yup it’s freeware!!!
What drew me to it even more was the amazing graphics!
check out this video comparing it to vista and you will know what I mean:

So after that scrumptious visual effects show I just had to try it out. Sounded simple enough.. just needed to download and burn myself a bootable CD. I still wanted to keep my XP running. So I installed Ubuntu on a separate partition with the option to Dual Boot… which means I get to choose between operating systems at start up. Brilliant yeah!! not quite..

I realized that the graphics I saw in the video doesn’t come with Ubuntu. It’s a separate software all together. DAMMIT! so had to do more research and I found “The beryl project”. Oh dang! more things to install!

Anyway long story short, I had to install this Beryl-manager thingy which I would describe to you as some sorta theme manager software you would find for any Windows OS.

It took me around 25mins to install Ubuntu and I spent 4 hours trying to get Beryl up and running…  OK.. forgive me a lil cause I’m no Linux expert. Truth be told I don’t know nutz about linux… codes like these are Greek to me:

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
sudo apt-get install beryl emerald-themes

anyway it took me awhile to figure out how to install stuff on ubuntu. (alt+F2) is the trick I tell ya…Finally got it working and now it’s pretty fun to fool around with. But I hope not to get bored too soon..

You wanna give it a try? You can go download the OS from : www.ubuntu.com