Other Help Topics :: Using DSL for an LCD Picture-Frame project
Hi,
Background-
I recently spent a considerable amount of time scanning in over 700 slides that my father had taken since the 1960's. Of those slides about 600 of them are still in pretty good condition and are now stored in high-res on DVD.
The idea-
I have several older laptops (i486-66 up to P3-700) and was thinking that I would like to take one of them appart and build one of those LCD Picture Frame things for my parents as a Christmas present and fill it with slides and photos I've scanned.
I considered using a hard-drive install of MS-Windows and placing the images on a CD mainly because that would be easiest for me. But as I started to think more about it, I decided that using a CD instead of a hard-disk would be better in the long run because hard-drives are noisy and they do fail eventually and I want this thing to last.
So my personal requirements for this project will be: Pentium 266 Laptop ( that works wonderfully with the default DSL CD) with 32MB of RAM and a CD-Rom drive. No Floppy Drive or Hard Drive in the final product. It may contain a PCMCIA network card. Probably a network card because my parents have likely forgotten half the slides they have and may want to retrieve photos from it for printing later.
So what I would like help with is:
I've just discovered this distro of DSL and it appears to contain everything I need. I believe I read somewhere that XV ( or xzgv ) can be used to run a slideshow using a script. Is there a better tool for this? Everything I have read about so far requires and X server.
As I am just now starting to learn about DSL, I would appreciate some direct help or maybe some links to references that would help speed up the learning process for me. Christmas is just around the corner and I have a lot of work to do if this is to be finished by Christmas.
I am a newbie to Linux, I have spent the past 9 years in the Microsoft Windows camp. I have discovered Linux, I love it and I am starting to use it more and more. "There is still hope for me." There is just so much to learn and I would like to cut down on experimenting as much as possible because of time constraints.
My imediate need-to-knows:
Building/Editing the main ISO? What tools to do that under Linux or Windows ( I run SUSE 9.1 on a few pc's and Win2k on a few others)
How do change DSL so that it will boot with no-prompts including login and run xmms or xv or xzgv in a command line mode with a script? ( There won't be a keyboard or pointing device once this is assembled )
I figured the best way to do this would be to integrate the 500+ MB of images I want to use in the slideshow, in to the bootable DSL image. Or, should I try to make separate partitions on the CD for DSL and the Slides and mount the slide partition after DSL loads. What do you think would be the best way?
I suffer from over-analysis paralisys... please help!
-Chris
Sounds like an interesting project.
I think that you may be better off using a large Compact Flash memory card (512MB or more) and a CF IDE adaptor.
It will behave like a hard drive, except DO NOT USE IT FOR FREQUENT WRITING like a swap file or you will destroy it. It is great for almost unlimited reads, has no moving parts, and is perfectly quiet.
So do a frugal install on to a CF / IDE card , or buy one from the Damnsmalllinux store and they will ship it to you.
Good Luck.
Just a small comment: is that P266 able to display 16 or 24 bit colour? - 8 bit colour doesn't work well with photos.
I did a GOOGLE search for xzgv slideshow script and found
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/dforum/forum.cgi?msg=402
http://nebel.gmxhome.de/tkalbum/README.html
This might be of interest to you
http://www.medcosm.com/pictureframe.html <---this one even mentions DSL!!!!
and http://kavlon.org/index.php/xvslide
Perhaps this and a livecd burned will allow you to run this...
Hope that helped
Brian
AwPhuch
Brian -
I just finished reading about that same project! 
I need to check it out.
Chris
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