Setup a laptop as a "picture frame"

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Setup a laptop as a "picture frame"
started by: digital-hoax

Posted by digital-hoax on Dec. 19 2006,20:47

Hello,

I'm new to the forum and don't know wether this is the right place, i appologise if it is not.

I am trying to set up an old laptop to work as a "picture frame" like the ones Philips are selling.
The requirements are the following:
1) No input needed at all - boot up to an OS (DSL) without user interaction and
2) Display pictures (probably from a screensaver) from a local folder that is accessible over the internet so I can add new pictures. Alternatively it could connect to a ftp or http server and display pictures from a certain directory.
3) Shutdown in the afternoon every day and boot up in the morning to save energy. It does come with a BIOS that is capable of booting at predefined times every day, so it basically has to shutdown at a certain time, probably only needs the right command to do this, I hope you can help me out on this one easily.

The purpose is to set up the laptop in a case-mod for my parents, and me and my brother want to be able to somehow display pictures we have taken. So we either want to connect to DSL via ssh or DSL has to load the pictures it displays from an internet source that we can change the pictures on. The laptop will have constant access to the internet of course. We don't yet know wether it will have a hdd, so another question would be how to create a boot-image of dsl with all the settings needed to work as described above.

I thank you in advance

Lennert

Posted by digital-hoax on Dec. 21 2006,08:42

Update:

The HDD will stay installed, and so it will be easier to configure (this is actually due to the fact that the laptop won't boot up at all if the hdd is not installed).

So I am now looking for the settings to

boot up to DSL without login-screen
mount a ftp server
run a screensaver that displays pictures from the mounted directory
shutdown at let's say 23:oo

Please help me out on this one!

Lennert

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Dec. 21 2006,14:38

1. install it (if you are also referring to the boot screen, you can install lilo/grub with no prompt)
2. what do you mean by this? (don't think you typically mount ftp sites)
3. xscreensaver (or see other picture show forum threads for alternatives)
4. cron

Posted by digital-hoax on Dec. 21 2006,15:53

Thanks a lot!

I thought for the screensaver to be able to display the pictures of the ftp server it needs a mount point? I will install xscreensaver and see what options it gives me.

I think I can get this done now pretty easily!

Lennert

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Dec. 21 2006,18:11

Well theres probably a non-standard tool that you could virtually 'mount' ftp sites on.

Posted by roberts on Dec. 21 2006,20:14

A while back, I recall this subject was popular.
The feh image viewer was used, but a remaster was done.

I have just posted a feh.unc in the unc section of the repository, so a remaster should not have to be done.

Also, apparently, feh can fetch and display images via an ftp://

You may want to consider feh.unc

Posted by beakmyn on Dec. 21 2006,20:51

Yes it was. I think I was one of the first

.

Anyway it's been a while since I decided to rebuild my picture frame, which I'm doing now.

So, I've been using some of the ideas on my page
www.frontiernet.net/~beakmyn along with this guy's
< http://www.thewares.net/item/33 >

and I've done the following (which I'll update on my page shortly)

Create 3 partitions
hda1 ~ 50 mb for frugal harddrive install -remove frugal line in grub boot to keep it readonly.

hda2 ~ 10mb for backup of data (persistant storage for mydsl)
hda3 remainder of drive for the pictures (re-mounted readonly via bootlocal.sh)

I boot DSL then it loads feh and unclutter from hda2. I had to create a feh and unclutter .dsl using deb2dsl but now that Roberts built a unc that's not neccesary. Thanks.

This solution works well for me. I find feh is better the zgv for the simple fact it's faster and quickly resizes pictures to fit my 800x600 screen.

This all works really well on my 166Mhz 80MB RAM. (digital Hinote VP575) it has no fan so it's very quiet.

Posted by toadkiller on Jan. 05 2007,14:07

Did it work?

Posted by digital-hoax on Jan. 05 2007,23:54

Thanks a lot for all the replies to my post. It actually did work, and made for a pretty cool christmas present. Unfortunately the laptop got to hot and one of the connectors (the one leading to the tft-screen) melted...
We actually did a frugal install (my brother sweared he didn't choose frugal but it turned out to be one) and put the sshd in the bootlocal.sh. We put on one of the screensavers mentioned on one of the pages from the links above and it worked well. Didn't get cron to work though, so we had it start up with the boot option from the BIOS and the idea was to shut it down with an entry in the bootlocal.sh (e.g. "shutdown 600").
We connected to the ssh server and uploaded pictures to one of the persistent directories from where they were displayed by the screensaver.

Short summary:

1. (frugal) hdd install
2.1. sshd on startup (i.e. bootlocal.sh)
2.2. shutdown on startup ("shutdown 600" in bootlocal.sh for 10 hours of uptime)
3. screensaver on startup (you have to put the startup command for this one in the xinit.conf because the screensaver requires X)
4. upload images to the folder from where the screensaver loads them on the screen

Hope to get it back working soon.

Greetings
D-Hoax

Posted by beakmyn on Jan. 06 2007,19:10

Just finished mine been using it all week flawlessly
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....26;st=5 >

Posted by jrwr on Jan. 11 2007,19:51

also, you can have a script (read the man pages for FTP) where at certen times it can update with a folder on the server