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Graphics Software Linux

Lite Linux Distros for a Digital Picture Frame? 56

Posted by Cliff from the all-in-one-solution-for-embedded-home-projects dept.
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?
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Lite Linux Distros for a Digital Picture Frame? More

Lite Linux Distros for a Digital Picture Frame?

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  • embedded linux (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cloudless.net ( 629916 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @02:33AM (#9244958) Homepage
    Shouldn't you begin with embedded linux instead of redhat?

    • Re:embedded linux (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @10:34AM (#9247509) Homepage
      That statement is close to being semantically null. RedHat can be used as "embedded Linux," and as far as a RT kernel, he certainly does not need one in this situation. As a rule, "embedded" doesn't mean much more than stripped libraries and an somewhat RT kernel- at least for Linux. Running a full distro rather than some "embedded" version probably means doing *a lot* less work. The thing has a harddrive, and he can install a pretty spartan system- so who cares? What difference would so-called "embedded" Linux make?

  • Different approach (Score:4, Insightful)

    by richie2000 ( 159732 ) <rickard.olsson@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @02:33AM (#9244959) Homepage Journal
    I used Gentoo on an old HP laptop with broken screen hinges. I also used the framebuffer stuff instead of a full windowing environment, partly because the laptop just had 64MB RAM and partly because I didn't feel like compiling X on a PII 266. :-)

    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)

    by Kevin Burtch ( 13372 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @02:35AM (#9244967)

    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)

      by zoloto ( 586738 )
      www.damnsmalllinux.org and a Compact FLASH to IDE Adapter. install it, make no swap, point all logs to /dev/null and adjust as neccicary.

      bingo, I did this with spare parts sans iso reauthoring in less than an hour.
    • There is a decent chance that a CF-card equipped setup would not be enough- though if it were my project, I'd rather have that than a hard drive. But, who knows- this guy may have a lot of photos, enough that it is a waste of money to go out and buy a 512 MB-4 GB CF card when he already has a laptop HD sitting around. I know that I have more than a 256 MB CF card of photos I'd like up if I were making one of therse things...

    • I'd recommend building yourself a simple "run from RAM" setup using Knoppix (or something similar)

      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)

    by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @02:38AM (#9244977) Homepage Journal
    since you are concerned about the mouse pointer, I presume you are running a full X implementation. Have you considered running this as a framebuffer applicaiton, and not loading X? fbv, fbi and DFBSee are all projects on Freshmeat that may provide you a way to bypass the running of X.

    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

  • Bootp (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ADRA ( 37398 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @02:47AM (#9245020)
    If your On-board NIC supports it, run everything on another PC with BOOTP/NFS if you really want to. You'd be able to change everything on the fly.

    Mind you, if everything's setup already, i'd just let it be.

  • Gentoo or Pebble? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Red Hat seems really stuffy for this kind of thing...

    I have some teeny boxes (Soekris 4501 and EPIA something) .. one uses Pebble (http://www.nycwireless.net/pebble/) and the other gentoo.

    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
    • I second the Gentoo suggestion: it's remarkably adaptable. I run it on a P120 laptop with 24MB ram and not much HDD by NFS-mounting /usr/portage whenever necessary and distcc-ing the compiles to whatever else is switched on in the house at the time.

      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)

    by zcat_NZ ( 267672 ) <zcat@wired.net.nz> on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @02:57AM (#9245057) Homepage
    Take any one of the single floppy rescue bootdisks.

    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.

    • Have you seen any pre-makes for this that are easily configurable? I've got a base system with most files in bzip'ed format... would like a small CD-bootable GUI that would allow for the user to choose various options during the install to unzip/configure the various packages.
      • You want me to build this for you?

        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
        • Nay, Nay... having somebody else build it would take away all the fun - I'm just looking for info on how others got started :-)

          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.

  • 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.

    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

    • Actually, I think that what he's probably talking about is a ramdisk similar to the ones used by knoppix. Essentially it's a section of memory initialized with a filesystem and mounted as a drive. Kernel initrd (Initial Ramdisk) is basically that in that part of the kernel is uncompressed from an image into a small "ramdisk."

      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
  • You can use minimal Slackware installation without Gnome and KDE. You need only X, Gtk and image viewer like qiv. You don't need even window manager. Simply put images to root window.

    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.
    • GTK? WTF?

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Building a picture frame out of a computer more powerful that the early supercomputers.

    Next we should make an WiFi enabled toothbrush that can run SETI@Home when idle.
  • I've been considering building a Digital Picture frame also.

    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
    • Well, If you are planning to do all that, I would at a touch screen LCD instead of normal buttons. Nicer design... :-)

      Good Luck!
      • The thing is I have a bunch of old laptops laying around (who doesn't) which I can just fold the screen back on it self and build a frame around it.

        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
        • I've had some experience with hardware buttons. It's fairly easy to use the control lines on the parallel or serial ports, but it is far easier to adapt a standard keyboard.

          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.
      • As far as planning to do all that, What I mentioned is just what I thought would be nice. I doubt most of it will happen.

        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 :p

  • My Pictureframe (Score:3, Interesting)

    by superid ( 46543 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @09:24AM (#9246699) Homepage
    I started down this same road shortly after seeing the /. article mentioned by the poster. I have nearly identical hardware too with an EPIA 800 and a laptop drive. Since drive space and memory were not at a premium I decided to not go with an anorexic installation but rather just a trim one.

    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.

  • It is a small 50meg linux distro. You could get rid of a lot of the apps and get it down even smaller. Are you including a network connection> you could then use you network drive to store the pictures.
  • Configure and cross-compile a customised installation using Rock Linux http://www.rocklinux.org/
  • Then you would have had a 10" TFT LCD, 16MB flash which you could put M4I or Jailbait Linux into, and it would have come with an application to do picture frame stuff, M4I supports some usb wifi nics, and it would have been like $99 for the unit itself.

    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

  • Currently, I'm using Red Hat 9 with GDM autologin...
    You can drop GDM and its autologin.
    RTF:
    man xinit
    man su
    ( hint: su - anon xinit session )
  • Puppy linux [goosee.com] might be what you're looking for (the flash version).. then again maybe it isn't. Your mileage may vary - good luck

  • eMoviX/MoviX (Score:2, Informative)

    by t4k1s ( 706242 )
    eMoviX/Movix are minidistros which are focused on multimedia display. You can boot and and it'll show audiofiles and movies which are on the same medium. I assume it can also show pictures, but haven't tried it though... I could be interesting as it is rather small and they describe setting up CompactFlash in their tutorials/docs.

    • Re:eMoviX/MoviX (Score:2, Informative)

      by t4k1s ( 706242 )
      Oh yes, and basically, it is based on Linux and MPlayer and displays using the framebuffer device (so no X needed). MoviX2 uses X though and has a bigger footprint.
  • http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

    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)

    by gozar ( 39392 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2004 @09:05AM (#9257901) Homepage

    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.

  • Why the reliance on Linux. FreeDos [freedos.org] should fit into 2 Mb, and (according to the interweb) DVPeg [uwaterloo.ca] will fit into 120k. No network support, but it'll be really simple to set up.
  • I used Damn Small Linux for my picture frame. I took his debian package list and liberal use of the rm command to strip it down to a command line only version. Then I found a frame buffer picture viewer [with slideshow mode]. The os weighed in at about 20MB, so even a 64MB or 128MB CF card was plenty for a decent amount of pictures (remember to prescale them to screensize to save space). The OS also implements Wireless support for a Symbol CF card Wireless card. Since my target had a two CF slots (one o

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