Last year I bought both of the Linux Toys books. One of the projects inside that caught my eye was the digital picture frame. I'd just been in an unnamed large department store where I saw a picture frame that would be perfect for this kind of a project - the catch was I didn't have the "spare" notebook required by the project. Well, I finally got a suitable notebook and hunkered down last night to work on the project. The digital picture frame project is in the first Linux Toys book (which in my opinion is the best of the two, there are more projects, and the projects are more interesting). The project uses an old notebook (Pentium II) which meant using an older distribution. Debian GNU could be used but it was easier to follow the project step by step with Red Hat 9. Yup, you read that right, Red Hat 9! I found the ISOs floating around on one of the Red Hat mirrors about a month ago and made sure I downloaded them lest the ISOs become harder to find. I think I searched about 15 mirrors before I found the ISOs.
The notebook I chose was a Dell CPi 366MHz notebook with 128MB RAM, a 6GB hard drive, and no battery! You can pick these up cheap on ebay. Unfortunately this notebook has a maximum resolution of 800x600. I would have liked to have had 1024x768, but the script in the Linux Toys book actually resizes the images to 640x480. I modified the script for 800x600. It's easy to do and spot within the code, you don't have to be a coding genius - the code is well documented. When I first loaded a bunch of pictures on my completed software install I discovered the software going around in an endless loop giving some error I couldn't diagnose easily. Using Ctrl-C wouldn't stop the process, neither would break. Eventually I tracked the problem down to the fact that my images had a space in the filename. The script doesn't work if there's a space in the filename of the images you're displaying. With proper filenames the picture software worked and Linux booted right up into the picture display mode.
Some things I have to work on next:
* Stop unnecessary services like cups
* Reducing noise from the system (my notebook is noisy)
* Packaging all of it in a nice picture frame.
< Part 2 is here >
