DSL digital picture frame

Forum: Cool Things
Topic: DSL digital picture frame
started by: stuporglue

Posted by stuporglue on Jan. 23 2006,05:26

Has anyone used DSL to make a digital picture frame? How did it go? Any tips? What should I use to continuously switch between pictures?

I've got an old Toshiba Tecra 700CT. It's a Pentium with 24 MB of RAM, though I may be able to up that to 40 or so. :-)

My plan is to make it boot directly to run a slide show program that rotates between the pictures in a /pictures directory. If the PCMCI works on here, and I can get networking up, that's how I'll update it.

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on Jan. 23 2006,20:59

I have made 3 different digital picture frames. If you want to use DSL there is a great how to < here. > I tried DSL, but the laptops I used were too old (4mb RAM, 500mb HDD) so I ended up using DOS. DOS loads much faster and only takes up about 3-4 MB on your hard drive. These machines run fantastic with lxpic and if you convert the files to gif you can fit 1000s on a 500MB HDD.

Posted by stuporglue on Jan. 24 2006,02:06

DOS would be faster. I think I'll still go with Linux though.

Thanks for the link though. That's just what I'm looking for. I hope to get a PCMCIA network card so I can do updates via the net, and I can't imagine DOS working with SSH very easily. :-)

FWIW, DSL installed very nicely on the laptop and works at a reasonable speed.

Thanks!

Posted by stuporglue on Jan. 26 2006,15:42

Well, using the scripts on the page YFG linked to, I've got the picture setup working quite nicely. The only problem now is that the screen blanks after about 40 minutes.

Is it an amp/acpi problem? The grub boot line says "noamp noacpi", but the amp module is still loaded.

Is there a way to turn off the screen powering off feature, or send commands every x minutes saying that the mouse has moved or a key has been pressed?

Thanks!

Posted by stuporglue on Jan. 27 2006,06:34

Turns out there was a setting in the BIOS that I'd missed. It seems to be working now. I'll post more thorough results, scripts and files to install once I'm sure I got it right.