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

iWeb comes standard with the most recent versions of iLife.  From Apple’s webpage: “iWeb makes it easy to create a website that’s stunningly beautiful — and totally you. Start with an Apple-designed theme, then customize it with your own text, photos, movies, and podcasts until it’s exactly what you want. And switch themes with a click anytime.”  These things are all true, although I found myself trying to make my sites more complex than iWeb had in mind.  More on that later.

iWeb was designed with the idea that its users would integrate with their .Mac account.  .Mac is simply Apple’s web hosting service that costs more than pretty much anyone else, and gives you less storage space and bandwidth.  .Mac does give you some new email addresses and the ability to sync/backup documents from your computer, but all things considered I would never purchase an account with them.

This already begins to affect the iWeb functionality, as you must have a .Mac account to use certain features such as blog comments, interactive picture slideshows, and only publishing changes from pages that have changed.  Confused?  Yeah, I don’t think it makes much sense either. 

Since I have a programming background, I decided that I could create a blog from a third party blogging site, update my blog template to match my iWeb template, and seamlessly integrate them together so that no one would be able to tell a difference.  Well, that didn’t work because the iWeb templates use a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, images, and some other stuff that made it more difficult than it was worth to try to mimic.  So, screw that idea.  After that failed I busted out my trusty Internet friend, Google, to see if other people had tried the same thing I did.  Turns out they did, and I came upon an application called iComment (link).

iComment utilizes a free third party commenting system called HaloScan (link) that users can integrate into pretty much whatever site they want.  I downloaded the demo of iComment to try it out and see if I liked it.  After running iComment a few times, I figured out that it was simply parsing my HTML pages and replacing/inserting text that HaloScan requires to display comments on a page.  Again, since I have a programming background I figured I could do that myself.  Turns out, this actually worked.  One excellent new feature of iWeb is called Web Widgets.  These things let you insert code directly into your HTML page, which was exactly what I need with HaloScan.  Sweet, right? 

I thought I was done. 

When I was testing my new comment functionality, I was using a web browser with an ad blocking add-in installed…this therefore meant that the ads HaloScan was inserting near my blog comments were not visible to me.  It wasn’t until my friend mentioned something to me that I noticed.  Since I didn’t set this page up to make money and look like crap, I kicked HaloScan off and decided to drop iWeb altogether.  I’ve since switched to WordPress as my blogging tool, and simple CSS for the layout.

Now don’t get me wrong here, iWeb certainly is nice.  It is by far the easiest web design tool that I have ever used.  It integrates very well with iPhoto so if you want a photo in a certain place you can simply drag and drop it on the page wherever you want.  It doesn’t get a whole lot simpler than that.  iWeb also comes with about 25 unique template styles, each with eight page styles so you can create a new page based on what it will be used for.  Example: blog, pictures, etc.  iWeb is also much, much nicer when it is used with .Mac, so all of the iWeb functionality can be used. 

For experienced web programmers, iWeb is definitely not the way to go.  There is no obvious way to make changes to the CSS, there is no easy way to edit the HTML code, and the functionality is greatly reduced when not used with .Mac.

In conclusion:
The Great
Ease of use, ability to make great looking websites without knowing a thing about the web.

The Good
Integration with iPhoto, WYSIWYG editor very intuitive to use.

The Bad
Adding HTML code through Web Widgets is awkward, publishing a site to a folder updates every single file on the site so it is difficult to upload only required files.

The Ugly
iWeb without .Mac integration is just a fancy version of Print Shop for the web.