Lite Linux Distros for a Digital Picture Frame?

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?

Comments

Different approach

[richie2000]

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!

[Kevin Burtch]

I'd recommend building yourself a simple "run from RAM" setup using Knoppix (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.

Bootp

[ADRA]

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.

A distro? for this?!!

[zcat_NZ]

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.

Re:Geexbox

[webhat]

So I'm an idiot, it's http://www.geexbox.org/.

I know: (Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)

Re:embedded linux

[RevAaron]

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?