cgp3389
Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: Oct. 2004 |
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Posted: Nov. 07 2004,19:03 |
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Well, here's an update for me. I am time constrained and as I said in my original post, I am a real newb when it comes to Linux. I wanted to use this as a learning experience but from what I am reading here, I have too much to learn and not enough time. I could probably follow what you guys are doing if I sat in front of it and followed allong but I would not have the background knowledge of Linux and would not understand what I am doing. I need to fully understand what I am doing before I do it. So I will continue my Linux education with easier things first.
With that said; I decided to fall back on my DOS knowledge and complete this project. I am at the point where I have completely disassembled the laptop and I am building a frame for it. I will throw together some pictures and pages and will post a link to this thread at some point if there is any interest.
Here is what I've done so far:
Found some Displaying Software on the web written years ago by a student at a school in Taiwan. It's pretty old but he had a DOS driver program that would run the 2MB S3 video of the laptop. Also, his program would do image conversion and display tons of different formats incuding movies and it would run sound (not using sound for my frame)
I downloaded FreeDOS (www.freedos.org) for the OS.
Built my autoexec.bat and config.sys files to load up the drivers for the CD-ROM, switch to that drive, load the display driver and run a batch file that starts the show.
I had used Adobe Photoshop Album to batch scale all 700 slides down to a size that would work on the 800x600 panel. They are 16bit color and still jpeg compressed but that guys program handles them just fine.
Took about an hour to create and test the batch files. I used a diskette to simulate the boot sector and the laptops hard drive to simulate the CD-ROM.
Burned a CD using the diskette as the boot sector and the hard drive contents as the data portion.
Removed the hard drive from the laptop and ran it with only a CD-ROM drive. I want this to have as few moving parts as possible so that it is quiet and more reliable.
From there I just started removing stuff from the laptop and tested it each time I removed something. It's now out of the case and down to 16MB (built in to the mainboard) I removed the keyboard, soundcard, hard drive, pcmcia slots.. a bunch of other parts. It still starts with no errors and runs the show.
Interesting thing I discovered about this laptop is that when there is no battery in it, it will power itself on when you plug it in to the AC. This means I don't have to get creative with the laptops power buttons, a simple on/off rocker-switch connected to the AC line is all I will need.
I decided to forget about remote access to it for a couple reasons. 1.) My parents probably wouldn't use the feature. 2.) would require a network cable or wireless network... 3.) I am going to give my parents a DVD with the original high-res slides anyway in case they want to print any of them.
I am also leaving the cd-rom drive door accessible so that the CD can be taken out.
So in summary: It was no challenge and less fun doing this with DOS, but it works.
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