CorePlus as video player kiosk

[quixote_arg]

Hi,

For my kids public school (0 budget) I'm trying to recycle an old pc (circa 2005) with 512mb of RAM to work as a video player kiosk, i.e. the pc will play videos from a dir over and over again.

My idea is to have everything in a usb drive (no hdd at all on the pc).

I installed CorePlus on a USB and it works fine. I downloaded and installed VLC on demand and it also works fine, now I want to make things permanent.

I cannot get to install VLC on boot on the USB drive.

I click the Set button on the TCE field and select /mnt/sdb1 (the location of the usb drive). The TCE field now shows /mnt/sdb1/tce/optional

Then it installs vlc and it works fine, but if I reboot, then VLC is gone.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

[Rich]

Hi quixote_arg
Click on the  Apps  icon. Then in the  Apps  utility click  Apps->Maintenance->OnDemand Maintenance  and select  VLC.  Click the
"Delete item from list"  buttton. No go to  Apps->Maintenance->OnBoot Maintenance  and select  VLC. Click the  "Add item"
button.

[quixote_arg]

Thanks Rich for your reply.

vlc.tcz is already on the OnBoot list

One thing I noticed is that if I try to do a backup to sdb1 then it shows "unable to mount device sdb1". Mount tool shows sdb in green (mounted?) and sdb1 in red (not mounted?)

If there's an easy way to install vlc (and it's dependencies) to the usb disk from outside tinycode (i.e. my main linux computer) then maybe that way is easier?

Any help will be much appreciated

[Misalf]

Code: [Select]

URL="http://tinycorelinux.net/9.x/x86/tcz"
for i in $(wget -O - "$URL"/vlc.tcz.tree) ; do for j in "" .dep .md5.txt ; do wget "$URL"/"$i$j" ; done ; done
Change the URL variable according to the TinyCore version and architecture you're using.

[curaga]

How did you install it? Having the main device mountable sounds weird. If you used a third-party installer (or dd?), please try the included installer.

[quixote_arg]

How did you install it? Having the main device mountable sounds weird. If you used a third-party installer (or dd?), please try the included installer.

Indeed... I used dd to burn the .iso file to the usb stick and boot with it. Not a good move? 

I remember reading in the forums that it is possible to install on the same usb used to boot, is that the case?

Thanks

[quixote_arg]

This thread is the one I meant. Is this advisable?

[Rich]

Hi quixote_arg

This thread is the one I meant. Is this advisable?

Though I don't recall that particular thread, I have seen other references to using  dd  to copy the  ISO  file to a thumb drive. I have
however always been under the impression that this was to avoid burning an actual CD, with the intent being to boot the thumb
drive and using that to run the install program.

[quixote_arg]

So it seems that the whole problem was that I was using the live CorePlus without ever installing it. I used two USB drives (dd to usb1, boot, install to usb2) and now everything seems to be working fine.

Thanks!

[quixote_arg]

Follow up question:

Since the usb has 2 partitions (sdb1 for CorePlus, sdb2 for the videos to show), I have to mount /dev/sdb2 on boot. I added a line to /opt/bootlocal.sh

Code: [Select]

mount /dev/sdb2
This works but feels like it's not the proper way to do it, out of curiosity: is there a better way?

[Rich]

Hi quixote_arg
Using  bootlocal.sh  for this is fine.

[quixote_arg]

Thanks all for the help!

With tiny core linux I managed to reuse a very old computer with 512mb of RAM to play videos, all from a USB drive. Fantastic!

[quixote_arg]

Hi all!

Follow up on this thread. The old computer works great for playing (slightly reduced) videos.

I have one problem though. Sometimes I go to the school and find it like this:



At first I thought it was a screensaver (which I have disabled via xset), but after ~8 hours of it running fine displaying videos and that screen not showing up, I'm more inclined to think it's a crash.

Have you ever encountered this screen before? Know what it is?

thanks!

[Rich]

Hi quixote_arg
Just speculation but I think either  X  or the desktop manager crashed. Possibly due to the  OOM-killer  (Out Of Memory) killing
a program to free up some RAM.

[curaga]

That is the X logo, which does point to a screensaver. I don't ever recall seeing it on a screen like that though.