Digital Signage and DSL

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Digital Signage and DSL
started by: jrtapp

Posted by jrtapp on Aug. 29 2007,16:02

I am trying to find a reasonable way to do a simple digital signage project and DSL looks promising. The DSmachine and the frugal load make a lot of sense for a machine that is basically going to idle 24 hours a day, 7 days a week while running a "power-point" type endless loop.

My question is does anyone have any suggestions for an application to do this? The Impress module of Open Office would work, but it is not very flexible and does not do any of the "non-slideshow" things we would like to do (i.e. run an RSS feed across the bottom of the display or have different panels within the display that are controlled separately)

The commercial applications that I have found are mostly Windoze based or an embedded Linux based system and all of them are very expensive.

TIA

Posted by curaga on Aug. 29 2007,17:04

Oh, an ad screen. Sure any Linux system can do that. Not a single app, but each app for it's own task (rss reader etc).

Posted by curaga on Aug. 29 2007,17:06

For separating parts of the screen, some window manager may be able to do that..

Posted by dare2dreamer on Aug. 30 2007,02:24

I'd use ratpoison for the window manager, and a simple image viewer like feh to display the images. I think both exist as extensions in the mydsl repositories.

Feel free to pm me if you need specific assistance.

Posted by curaga on Aug. 30 2007,10:00

Quote

The screen can be split into non-overlapping frames.

Yeah, ratpoison is the way to go!

Posted by jrtapp on Aug. 30 2007,13:35

Thanks, I will look into ratpoison. I have not heard of that before. Is it a window manager or an application? If it is a window manager, what application(s) would you recommend to run within the windows?

(Sorry if this is a newb question, I have not researched ratpoison yet)

Posted by curaga on Aug. 30 2007,14:45

It's a wm. And the screenshot at ratpoison.org with the screen divided into 4 would be exactly what you wanted, right?

For apps, well, what will you need? Feh was already mentioned as a good image viewer. If you need to play video, then Mplayer. You could even run OO.o Impress in one of the slices, to scroll text or so.

Posted by jrtapp on Aug. 30 2007,15:02

OK, I missed the feh suggestion, that is another program that is new to me but looks promising.

Any suggestions for a scrolling ticker type RSS reader?

Thanks for all of the great suggestions!!!!