Super small DSL for digital photo frame?

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Super small DSL for digital photo frame?
started by: wdwms

Posted by wdwms on April 20 2004,16:38

Greetings,
I'm going to be making a digital photo frame from an old laptop. I'd love to use DSL, but i need to slim the distribution down. Essentially I only need the OS, FTP, cron and a software package to display files in a loop in full screen. Thats it, no more no less..

Bios will boot laptop at 9am
Cron job at 9:05 will download all files from FTP server
9:10 beging showing files
11:30pm power down.

Any ideas on where to start? i know very little on compiling or redoing linux distributions.. Thanks!

Todd

Posted by TyphoonMentat on April 20 2004,18:07

Perhaps you could have a look at < http://www.whitedwarflinux.org > (a very small distro) or have a look at the various Remastering HOWTOs - just check out the Howtos forum for a few.

Posted by skaos on April 21 2004,15:35

You could also take a look at Basic Linux 3.10 (http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/, < http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/baslinux/) > which comes with Xvesa and the simple xli image viewer. There is no cron or ftp, but according to the creator you can download them from a Slackware 3.5 site.

I played a little around, and with the following /root/.xinitrc file you can show each wallpapers for 5 seconds (stops at last wallpaper though, you have to fix it to start from the beginning again), and I guess that you could use xli to do something similar:

#!/bin/sh
export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0

# wallpaper
cd /usr/share/swm/pixmaps
TEST=`ls`
for i in $TEST
do
swmbg $i &
sleep 5
done

I don't have a DSL installation around, but I guess that you could slim it down by removing a lot from /usr/X11R6/bin.