Lite Linux Distros for a Digital Picture Frame? 56
bwy asks: "I'm building a digital picture frame, inspired by a story here at Slashdot. Currently, I'm using Red Hat 9 with GDM autologin, icewm, and a slideshow program autostarting. I've installed code to hide the mouse pointer and the 'powerswitch' kernel module to allow the frame to run a proper shutdown (instead of a suspend) when the ATX power switch is pressed. The hardware is an EPIA 5000 with a laptop drive. I think this is overkill, however, and I am a purist. Is there a lightweight distribution that is EPIA friendly? Such a distro shouldn't install GCC, so I'll need all the software as binaries. How would I go about booting from a ramdisk? This would make the 'powerwitch' kernel mod not so important since there is no worry of corrupting the file system." Does anyone have distribution suggestions, or pointers to other information that might be helpful for such a project?
Re:You don't need binaries. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:You don't need binaries. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:You don't need binaries. (Score:1)
irssi 0.8.4 backdoor [irssi.org]
If you blindly run stuff you pull from the net, sooner or later you will pull down some malware, and then the fun begins.
Re:You don't need binaries. (Score:1)
Re:You don't need binaries. (Score:2, Insightful)
And by buffer overflows being *easier* I meant more likely to escape detection. A shell being bound to a listening port is something that should *obviously* not be happening in most programs.
As you said it is not as good or as fool proof as a backdoor. But backdoors are much more obvious then buffer overflows. And considering script-kiddies seem to have plenty of tools already for attack buffers, I don't think you have
Re:You don't need binaries. (Score:2)
Speaking of OpenBSD, they're heavily into systrace [systrace.org] these days, which gives you some leeway to work with software from less audited sources.
Currently, Systrace is integrated in NetBSD and OpenBSD, with a Linux port also being maintained. Similar functionality is available in the Okena (now Cisco) Security Agent for MS-Windows and Solaris, for $$$$.
Re:You don't need binaries. (Score:2)
embedded linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:embedded linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Different approach (Score:4, Insightful)
The main reason for using Gentoo was that it let me decide exactly what to install. No servers in the background, no rxtra nothing. I was thinking of just deleting gcc and the source after I was done but I never got around to it, thinking I might need it later.
Woah! Overkill! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd recommend building yourself a simple "run from RAM" setup using Knoppix [knopper.net](or something similar), and install it on a CompactFlash card.
CompactFlash has several data transfer modes, one of which is essentially IDE.
Yes, you can take one of those ultra-cheap PCMCIA->CompactFlash adaptors, rip it apart and solder on a parallel IDE cable (google for it, it's common), and plug it right into your motherboard. I just googled for it myself, and found that CompactFlash-IDE adaptors are now being sold, so you don't even need to get your soldering iron out.
Now you've eliminated the hard drive, so you don't have to worry about the various issues associated with them, and you've eliminated the issue with powering off the device while it's running.
Re:Woah! Overkill! (Score:3, Informative)
bingo, I did this with spare parts sans iso reauthoring in less than an hour.
Re:Woah! Overkill! (Score:2)
Re:Woah! Overkill! (Score:2)
Try Morphix [morphix.org] You take a basic image [sourceforge.net] then just add a minimodule, using the mminimodule generator (See HowTos).
Then you have you operating system, and photos all on the CD. Very low power and if you have enought memory to hold all the photos in ram it will run cool.
thoughts, ideas... (Score:3, Interesting)
You could also do bootable CD-RWs that you can update the contents of your image library at any time, with any cdrw capable computer.
Just a couple thoughts to kick around.
-Rusty
Re:thoughts, ideas... (Score:2)
Bootp (Score:4, Interesting)
Mind you, if everything's setup already, i'd just let it be.
Gentoo or Pebble? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have some teeny boxes (Soekris 4501 and EPIA something)
I'm not sure if Pebble has GUI or X stuff, but it is based on Debian. It is actually optimized for wireless use. It runs read-only off the CF card so it is safe to just cut the power. You can probably hammer that into shape.
Gentoo is something else I'm playing with, using distcc for compiling (i.e., no compiling on the
Re:Gentoo or Pebble? (Score:1)
My thoughts for the picture-frame: absolutely compactflash and an IDE adapter; make it as read-only as possible so as not to wear-out the CF card (although they're not too expensive anyway).
Make a custom Gentoo install inside a chroot on a more powerful comput
A distro? for this?!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Add a copy of "zgv" (statically compiled, or you'll need to include vgalib and jpeglib)
Write a script that launches zgv with the appropriate parameters. Once you know it works, reinstall lilo so that your script gets run as init.
Total footprint will be perhaps two meg. Make an 'installer' for Linux or windows that dumps this at the start of a bootable CD and then lets the user fill the rest with pictures?
If you really have to have the fancy screen-merges and stuff, you can make up a system with JUST the linux kernel, XFree86, xscreensaver, and the very few libs that these depend on, basically the same way.
Re:A distro? for this?!! (Score:2)
Re:A distro? for this?!! (Score:1)
Am I getting paid?
I did have another thought about this; base it on damn small linux. It's a 50M bootable CD image which probably includes xscreensaver already.
That gives you a nice GUI and some basic toolkits for doing menus (I think it includes python, etc), leaves 600+M for images, and it designed to run from a read-only filesystem, so you don't need to worry about shutting down cleanly.
If you're serious about this hire a comp-sci student during the holidays, they ca
Re:A distro? for this?!! (Score:1)
I've used small CD distros such as "Timos rescue CD set" (no X11 though), but I've not tried Damn Small... though I think I remember hearing about it. I'll give that one a shot - thanks for the advice.
Corrupting the filesystem (Score:2)
Actually, booting off a ramdisk would have the same worries of corrupting the filesystem as booting off a hard disk. Well, I guess it depends on what kind of ram disk you're referring too -- flash ram would have the same problem, but a ram disk that's loaded from boot media at bootup would not.
What you probably want to do is just never open
wrong RAMdisk (Score:2)
Basically the way you would work this is to have the base kernel/system loaded off a hard-disk/card/CD, and put all your working space in memory. Again, bootCD's often use this approa
Slackware? (Score:2)
There must be only one rw filesystem for images. Use ReiserFS (or any other fs) in sync mode and don't care about proper shutdown anymore
Since there's no binary-only programs, one can use the same do-it-yourself approach almost on any hardware supported by Linux or NetBSD.
Re:Slackware? (Score:1)
Grab eFiji. It's a small, slightly buggy root window image setter I wrote as a random background setting program. No GTK, no big requirements, just X11 and ImLib. Hell, you could probably find one that's been maintained more that'd do the same job.
This is funny (Score:2, Funny)
Next we should make an WiFi enabled toothbrush that can run SETI@Home when idle.
Picture frame with Media reader & NAS (Score:2, Interesting)
I want to be able to insert my CF (SmartMedia, MMC, etc) Card into a "52,000-in-one" USB reader, hit a Transfer button and have the images transfered to my RAID'ed network attached storage (probably a samba share). Then have the option to erase the CF card
Have files renamed based on the EXIF information imbedded in the JPEG headers when they are transfered to the storage server
(for example, 2004-05-25_021544b YYYY-MM-DD_HHmmss and if that already
Re:Picture frame with Media reader & NAS (Score:2, Interesting)
Good Luck!
Re:Picture frame with Media reader & NAS (Score:1)
But if I need a touch screen then I have to use a Mini-itx board ($$$) and the touch screen ()
I was figuring if I used hardware buttons it wouldn't be too hard to hook them up to the parallel port or something like that.
Perhaps I should could remove the eraser style mouse pointer from the keyboard and attach it to the frame...Thing is I'm trying to go for sim
Re:Picture frame with Media reader & NAS (Score:2)
If you have the space, just pull a key off the keyboard and wire in a switch instead. Or, you can do what I have done and just rip the keyboard controller out of the case; they are very simple devices really.
Re:Picture frame with Media reader & NAS (Score:1)
The main thing that is important to me is the insert CF card and hit the BIG RED BUTTON(TM) to transfer to NAS. "Should" be doable with shell scripts I reckon. Never done shell scripting so we'll see how it goes
Re:Geexbox (Score:5, Informative)
I know: (Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)
My Pictureframe (Score:3, Interesting)
I chose to use Fedora. I did not load X Windows and instead used fbv from an autologin console. I found it very useful to have lots of console tools (lynx, wget, gcc) available to me. And basically there was no benefit in trying to trim disk usage by a few hundred Meg.
You might give Damn Small Linux a try (Score:2)
ROCK Linux (Score:2)
If you had purchased an i-Opener instead (Score:2)
Tell you what, I have an i-Opener with a USB hub and a 3com USB 10/100 TP NIC, I'll trade you for your setup. If you have an LCD to go with it, that is.
IMO you should look into USB boot capabilities in your hardware. Then you should pick up the cheapest U
One small tip for the beginner :) (Score:2, Informative)
You can drop GDM and its autologin.
RTF:
man xinit
man su
( hint: su - anon xinit session )
Puppy Linux (Score:1)
eMoviX/MoviX (Score:2, Informative)
Re:eMoviX/MoviX (Score:2, Informative)
Damn Small Linux (Score:1)
50 meg live cd, based on knoppix/debian
It can be installed on as little as a 250-300MB drive.
At one point they had people who sucessfully installed in on a 486-33? 66? something like that. It has xzgv which should do the picture viewing you want.
Linux might be overkill... (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently finished putting together a digital picture frame. I bought an old IBM thinkpad from eBay ($10) and a power adapter (another $10 from eBay).
This is a 486 with 2 MB of ram and only a floppy drive. A DOS boot disk boots the machine, sets up a ramdisk, copies the pictures to the ramdisk, and then runs a slideshow with pictures from the ramdisk. Totally silent and heat issues are non-existant.
I haven't had time, but I'm just going to make up a couple of disks with different categories of pictures. A nature disk, family disk, etc. I just have to reboot the machine when I want to a different category. I resize all the pictures to 640X480 (resolution of the screen) so they are pretty small (50k) and I can fit quite a few on a floppy.
My next project will be to wire a timer into the display switch that detects movement. Once movement is detected it switches on the display for a preset time. That way I don't have to worry about the screen being on for the 16 hours a day I'm at work or asleep.
My biggest complaint is that I didn't do my research on the laptop. The passive matrix screen really blows.
Other Options (Score:1)
Damn Small Linux (Score:1)