User Feedback :: Thanks DSL - Security Camera

I have been using Damn Small Linux for a while now, as a recovery disc, a lightweight server on a small linux box, and in VMware for development testing. Basically when I have an old comp and I want it to do something new I pop DSL in it.

Today's experiment was making a quick security camera.

I had a Celeron 366 with 128MB ram and 1gb HD hooked up to a network and a beat up but working Creative Webcam NX Pro.

I went here to grab spca5xx.o. Grabbed dpkg from MyDSL, and XawTV from MyDSL and I had the webcam video on my screen. I was honestly surprised. I thought it would have taken more work.

After some messing around I ended up grabbing Motion from MyDSL, tweaked the conf, and got it doing exactly what I wanted.

Once the setup was good I decided to shut it down, I disconnected the harddrive, added another 128mb ram that I found, and booted with "toram" and saved the files via a Samba share to another computer on the network. This way the computer is using a bit less power and is very much quieter since it has no harddrive and the CD-rom spins down after a while.

I had actually attempted to do the same thing in WinXP, since that was installed on the computer to start with. I grabbed some motion sensing/image publishing software from sourceforge.net but the poor little guy just couldn't handle it.

Doing the same thing in DSL, it ended up moving lightning fast. Motion running adds pretty much no overhead, and even when it's grabbing the images and storing them across the net the slowdown is barely noticeable.

I really feel like anything I want to do (within reason) will be doable in DSL because there are so many .dsl or .uci packages available, and so many forum posts describing how to get stuff done.

Next step is to reauthor a livecd preset to do this. I know such things exist already but it sounds like fun to try and it's always nice to get exactly what you want.

original here.