From this point forward I will explain the howto software aspect of my new digital picture frame.

Requirements:

1) Unused laptop capable of booting off USB, with Internet access
I used a Pentium III, 850MHz, with 256MB of RAM. This is probably complete overkill, but it’s what I had laying under the bed collecting dust. Internet access [for my particular case] is only required to download software. The ethernet jack on my computer was broken, so I actually set up almost everything on another PC, then transfered the flash drive to my laptop for the final product. I have read other posts in which people used wireless internet to update the photos, and/or SSH into the machine to make modifications…but I will not touch on that here.

2) USB drive
64MB is needed for the OS, and you can add as much onto that as you so desire for photo storage. Keep in mind that most [older] laptop screens are probably only 1024 pixels wide, so the photos don’t need to be ultra high quality (ie, there is no need for 10 megapixel pics). I used a 4GB flash drive, because that’s what I had laying around. I think I have about 2GB of free space leftover after installing the OS and shrinking the photos.

3) Damn Small Linux (link)
This was the best Linux distribution that I was able to find to install on a flash drive. Damn Small Linux (DSL) provides a very small installation, and offers an option to install directly to a thumb drive without any hacking around. I also tested out Ubuntu and Debian, but wasn’t ever able to get them to boot off of the flash drive. Those two distributions also required ~1GB of space so my install would have been extremely bloated, and the extra software would have been pointless for a picture frame. I did get Slax to install and boot up with no problems, but I was not able to find a good image viewer to use for a slideshow. I found that a lot of these “pen drive Linux” versions don’t come with a whole slew of applications…and they shouldn’t.

4) feh (.dsl package can be found here)
This is a very lightweight image viewer that I used to implement the photo slideshow. There are probably other software options available, but I found a pre-built package for my situation. It has a few nice scripting features that I was able to take advantage of.

5) Unclutter (.dsl package can be found here)
This program is used for hiding the mouse cursor after a certain period of inactivity. By default in DSL and with the feh slideshow, the mouse cursor never goes away. In order to avoid an annoying arrow in the middle of the screen during a slideshow, I used Unclutter to take care of this.

Setup Steps:

1) Install DSL on the flash drive. Additional details, if you need them, can be found here. Boot off the Live CD, then “simply open the Main menu, go to Apps then Tools and select either a USBZIP or USBHDD and follow the prompts.”

2) Upgrade to GNU Tools: (link). “from the system menu select Apps->Tools->Upgrade to GNU Utils.” This will allow feh and Unclutter to work.

3) Download feh and Unclutter .dsl files, and place them in your mydsl folder so they are loaded on boot. gnu-utils.dsl should already be in that directory. For me this was in /mnt/sda1/mydsl.
feh (http://www.frontiernet.net/~pictureframe/mydsl/feh.dsl)
Unclutter (http://www.frontiernet.net/~pictureframe/mydsl/unclutter.dsl)

4) Create script to run the slideshow. I used bash for this because the script is extremely basic and simple to implement. I also decided to store my script file in the $HOME directory…for no real reason. You could move this around if you wanted to.
   file:$HOME/start_slideshow.sh
   1> #!/bin/bash
   2> feh -rzF -D 60 /location/to/your/photos/
   3> sudo shutdown -h +1
Line 2 will start feh searching the directory recursively, displaying images at random, full screen, and at 60 second intervals. The script will not continue past line 2 since I didn’t use the ‘&’ at the end of the command to run the process in the background. This is good, however, because then we can gracefully shutdown the system with the second line by exiting feh. I exit feh by pressing ‘Q’ on the keyboard…not the most beautiful solution, but it works. Line 3 will halt the machine in 1 minute, giving you time to kill the shutdown sequence (sudo shutdown -c) if you would like to gain access to the desktop again.
Download my example

5) Comment out the line in .jwmrc that opens the root menu. I did this so that my full screen slideshow was really full screen.
   file:$HOME/.jwmrc
   comment out: RootMenu height=”20″ onroot=”123″
Download my example

6) Edit .xinitrc to automatically start Unclutter and the slideshow when the X Desktop starts
   file:$HOME/.xinitrc
   x1> /usr/X11R6/bin/unclutter &
   x2> $HOME/start_slideshow.sh &
   x3> xset s off
Line 1 starts Unclutter, line 2 starts the slideshow, and line 3 turns the screensaver off so the slideshow will not be interrupted.
Download my example

7) Prepare photos. In my case, the flash drive partition that didn’t hold the OS was located at /mnt/sda1. This was the perfect place to store my photos, especially since this partition could be accessed by my Mac. I created a subdirectory called ‘photos’ and copied 4000 files in there.

So there you have it, the gory details on how I set up the software for my digital picture frame. I’ll discuss the hardware aspect at a later date.

Here are a few additional links that I used for reference:
http://www.thewares.net/item/33
http://www.frontiernet.net/~pictureframe/
http://linuxbrit.co.uk/feh/wiki/FehHelp

Edit (July 31, 2008): Apparently the links for the .dsl packages of feh and unclutter don’t work anymore, so I’ll post them here:

• feh
• Unclutter

My laptop is/was 6.5 years old, so it was pretty much worthless. To make laptop operation even more worthless, the battery had been completely dead for probably three years. Laptop – battery = very small desktop. Also, the power jack was not in the best condition, so if you moved the computer in the wrong direction or nudged the power cord, the darn thing shutoff immediately (when I said the battery was dead I really meant it). So if all of this didn’t make my laptop worthless enough, icing on the cake is that the Ethernet jack was also busted, so I couldn’t even plug it in to get on the internet. Who cares about wireless internet when you still have to plug the thing in to the wall?

Case in point: the computer worked (sort of), but was practically worthless. I don’t even know the last time I turned it on.

Making a do it yourself (DIY) picture frame should be easy enough, right? It seemed that all I needed to do was strip out all the unnecessary hardware (CD-ROM, floppy, battery, hard drive), slap a small version of Linux on a bootable flash drive, and write some scripts to run a slideshow once the computer started. After that all that needed to be done was disassemble the laptop, and mount the final results in a form suitable to hang on a wall somewhere.

I may go through the gory details later, but for now I’ll stick to the basics. After installing multiple versions of Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Slax, Damn Small Linux) multiple times and even attempting a Windows install, I kept running into stupid issues which mostly came down to not being able to boot off the flash drive and not being able to load the software I needed/wanted for the slideshow. After some “research” that consisted of a lot of Google, cussing, and burning CD-R’s, I finally chose Damn Small Linux (DSL). I’m not kidding, that’s the name of this distribution, and it’s really damn small. The download is about 50 megs, and even after I installed some additional software it’s still under 75 megs with no problems. As a comparison, Windows Vista requires over 250 times that much free space before you can even install it.

Cool, right? My laptop now boots off a flash drive, starts a slideshow, and pressing the ‘Q’ key turns the whole thing off. Perfect! Time for disassembly. I should mention that before I began this project I didn’t care about this computer. If I broke it, oh well it was collecting dust anyways. I never realize how many tiny screws held that laptop together. It took a few hours, but I finally managed to strip it all down to the LCD screen, motherboard, processor, USB connectors, power button, and some LED’s that light up when the computer is on. Now for the moment of truth: will this thing boot up after all the destruction? I present to you an abridged script of what transpired:

<----Begin transcript---->

Jonathan takes a deep breath as he presses what’s left of the power button. Some LED’s on the motherboard light up, signifying that the boot process has begun. He looks delighted. The LCD screen displays the BIOS, and then begins to load the operating system.

Jonathan
“Sweet!” he says out loud, thinking to himself that he’s a complete genius and this contraption sitting on the desk, as ghetto as it looks, it actually going to work.

The operating system continues to load, stepping through all of the required steps for Linux to start up. Jonathan is thrilled. The complexion on his face is one of excitement and satisfaction. After about two minutes a loud “POP!” comes from the computer, and a piece of something shoots towards Jonathan.

Jonathan
“Oh s—!!! No freakin’ way!!! Are you freakin’ kidding me?! Son of a b——!!!”

The computer shuts off, the screen goes blank, and Jonathan sits in his chair dumbfounded at the previous events.

<----End transcript---->

Ladies and gentlemen, that “pop” was the sound of me frying my processor chip, and it flying off of the module it was formally soldiered to. For whatever reason, be it ignorance or apathy, I had decided that I didn’t need the heat sink on the processor when I booted it up. For those of you who don’t know, computer processors get very, very, very hot when then are running. 200 degrees is not unheard of, especially for a desktop machine. If the processor doesn’t have any way to dissipate this heat (like a heat sink and fan), it will keep getting hotter and hotter until it fries, burns out, explodes, kills itself, catches on fire, etc. Once a chip does this, it’s game over. This video will show you some examples. I should note that I don’t have volume, so I have no idea what is being said. (EDIT: Turns out it’s just a little techno music)

So this is the current state of my do it yourself digital picture frame from my old laptop computer. I’ll post some pictures later. I’m checking eBay to see if I can located a new processor, but originally I really didn’t want to spend and money on this project. Isn’t $2500 for the computer enough?