Ivan Čukić » Embedded

Embedded Plasma continued

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:26:04 +0000

There are some news concerning applets for the embedded Plasma I mentioned earlier. There are two new plasma applets in the playground (trunk/playground/base/plasma/applets/embedded-ivan/) – one that shows the title of the currently active window (needed since I intend to remove the decorations of main windows) and a simple task manager/application launcher which is on the left.

They are not fully operational yet, and have no documentation on how to set them up, so don’t even bother. I just wanted to say that they exist.

The task manager/application launcher contains a predefined set of icons. Each icon represents one task or application. And when you click it, application is started, or in case it is already running, it is brought to front. Some say that MacOS X has something similar, but I wouldn’t know, I haven’t tried it. (please skip comments about OSX… they might get deleted instantly).

Cheerio!

Plasma Embedded

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:05:24 +0000

Due to some fortunate events, I got my hands on a small (miniITX) all-in-one board based on AMD Geode, which you can see in the picture. It is a low-power thing without any coolers (not even passive ones).

My job was to install Linux on it. And I did just that – Debian GNU/Linux with KDE 4.1 beta which is in Debian’s experimental repositories. I hooked the system to my screen so that you can see what it looks like (although it was a bit odd to hook something like this to a 19″ screen). It behaves surprisingly well – the system is responsive and works very well (with all fancy Plasma animations)

The ultimate goal is to create an environment for systems that will have the ability to run only a limited set of predefined applications (for example a web browser, mail client and office suite). For this, there will be some changes to the screen you have in the screenshot, but I’ll talk about that a bit later.