TinyCore as photo frame OS

[stasheck]

Hello,
First of all, I'm new here, so: hi!

I have a laptop that I'm converting to a photo frame - it's Sony VAIO Z600NE: PIII-650, 128 MB RAM and some ATI card (no 3D accel) with 1024x768 display. I already succeeded with booting it from 1 GB CF card; the ultimate here is to read .jpg from NFS server over a wifi connection and show them; all with minimal CPU usage (I aim for passive cooling).

I was quite certain that you don't actually need to start X to run graphics mode on Linux, but perhaps I was wrong - I can't find any image viewer that wouldn't need it.

Does anyone know a simple program which will only show a given picture? Or maybe start a slideshow from a given directory? Minimal resources, possibly no desktop environment.

Thanks in advance.

[pioj]

There are indeed som available options to make a photo slideshow without X11, but it's up to you to choose the best one that fits your needs.

Most apps will require X11, though...

(i.ex; using DKMS or /dev/fb0 and fbvi works too).

[nitram]

I have a laptop that I'm converting to a photo frame - it's Sony VAIO Z600NE: PIII-650, 128 MB RAM and some ATI card (no 3D accel) with 1024x768 display. I already succeeded with booting it from 1 GB CF card; the ultimate here is to read .jpg from NFS server over a wifi connection and show them; all with minimal CPU usage (I aim for passive cooling).

I was quite certain that you don't actually need to start X to run graphics mode on Linux, but perhaps I was wrong - I can't find any image viewer that wouldn't need it.

Does anyone know a simple program which will only show a given picture? Or maybe start a slideshow from a given directory? Minimal resources, possibly no desktop environment.

Thanks in advance.

Hi, welcome.

Most Tiny Core users utilize Window Managers, not dedicated Desktop Environments. When you say X is not required, you are correct if you mean Xorg/X Window System. But...you still need something to display your pictures/graphics.

Depending on your hardware, try running Tiny Core with either Xvesa or framebuffer instead of Xorg (default Tiny Core is actually Xvesa i believe). They are both light weight but may/not give you the desired graphic resolution, tinkering will be necessary. Read about it in Chapter 28 (old hardware), ~ page 130 of the Tiny Core manual:
http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html

There's an extremely lightweight image viewer i occasionally use in the TC 6 repository named flpicsee.tcz. It apparently supports slideshow but i've never used it in this mode. All the best.

[Misalf]

I'm using  fbv  to display images in framebuffer while booting. It doesn't have any dependencies.

It's available in the 4.x repo and works on 6.x too.
http://tinycorelinux.net/4.x/x86/tcz/fbv.tcz

It doesn't support that many file formats though.

[Juanito]

fbv added to 6.x repo - thanks

[stasheck]

So yeah, the project is taking more time than I thought :-)

So fbv is doing exactly what I needed it to do, but searching around it's long-forgotten by its developer. The most up-to-date similar program seems to be feh (http://feh.finalrewind.org/).

I can see that there is tcz with feh in 4.x repository, can I use it with 6.x? Alternatively, may I ask to compile the newest version for 6.x? (or I can compile and prepare it, just need to learn how first ).

Not to spawn a new topic: most of the TCL manual is written with GUI user in mind; there is a note how to make persistent userdir via GUI, but what is the relevant command in terminal? Or do I have to simply run tar each time I want to save my homedir?

Last but not least: how can I make TCL run a sequence of commands after boot and spawn SSH daemon? For a photoframe OS, I need to have: network settings from DHCP; SSH access; NFS share with photos mounted and finally feh run. I more-or-less figured how to have network&SSH running, I believe I'm on good track with NFS (automount, right?) - do I have to write an rc.d script for feh, or would some other way to do it be preferrable?

[gerald_clark]

To do a backup, you cna run the backup command.
I suggest you spend some time in the wiki.
You will find answers to your questions, and more there.

[stasheck]

...and back to the project again. I have compiled fim version for 7.0, including X and framebuffer support (no aa mode though). I want to share, if someone's interested - how to do it?

[Misalf]

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:creating_extensions
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:creating_extensions#submission

Before submitting, you might want to check your created extension via the  submitqc  script, provided by  submitqc.tcz .