My Picture Frame - Redo

[beakmyn]

I made this back before everyone started coming out with digital picture frames and decided to revamp it into something new.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9762454@N04/3363046870/

It's a Digital Hinote VP575 laptop - small and quiet no fans needed.

166 MHz Pentium

2 GB Hard drive

80MB RAM - runs at about 75MB usage, jumps up to 96MB used when using VNC or updating picture.

Ethernet right now since there's no wifi at work :(

I'm thinking about

Gives the basics of time, calendar, weather forecast. Background changes each hour.

[dr0p]

That was a really nice idea actually :3 Personally though I wouldn't be running Windows, uses too much resources.

[silentknight329]

that is deadly.. i'm setting my system up like that RIGHT NOW!!! thats how cool it is lol

[shonen]

I love it, it blows all over the prefab shit you buy in stores.

Very nice and you were ahead of the times creating that.

[beakmyn]

That was a really nice idea actually :3 Personally though I wouldn't be running Windows, uses too much resources.

Yes it is but I also tried various other installs. With Linux the plan was to run conky forecast. Some things you have to keep in mind this is "ancient hardware". There is no USB.

ubuntu CLI - failed 3/4 way through no matter what I tried

Damn Small Linux - Could not get Perl's dependencies to compile. In fact I have to boot using

fb800x600 noacpi noapm nomce noddc nousb noscsi

Puppy Linux - wouldn't boot

Also, there were issues with the PCMCIA ethernet card(s) I'm using and the wireless card

Various implementations of nLite XP, 2000 with service packs no boot

Win98Se runs great but Rainmeter won't run on Win98SE

Windows 2000 - didn't work as well

So, I am forced to settle with XP, although I've gone through and removed all extra software and disabled most services.

All in all I'd say that only using 75MB of RAM right now is pretty damn good on system resources. John's Background switcher actually uses the most memory ~20MB since it uses .Net. Otherwise with just XP running I'm using about 30-40 MB of RAM

XP, Rainmeter, John's Background switcher, TightVNC, bbdeleted

BTW, if anybody does want to make an actual picture frame, here's a howto I did a few years back using Damn Small Linux. Watch the links, either me or ISP has deleted this page 3 times so I just grabbed a copy from webarchive and put it back up I need to remove webarchive's redirects in the hyperlinks.

http://www.frontiernet.net/~pictureframe/

[dr0p]

I personally would have tried Gentoo, but you might not have wanted to deal with the compiling times on that processor?

[beakmyn]

I personally would have tried Gentoo, but you might not have wanted to deal with the compiling times on that processor?

Actually I tried Gentoo on this machine once. It took over a week to compile X!

If I can find a lightweight distro that can meet the perl dependencies then I'll go with linux and Xorg. But for now it's XP.

I'd like to get back to a damn small frugal install since I make everything read only at boot and not have to worry about when the power goes out.

[dr0p]

Actually I tried Gentoo on this machine once. It took over a week to compile X!

If I can find a lightweight distro that can meet the perl dependencies then I'll go with linux and Xorg. But for now it's XP.

I'd like to get back to a damn small frugal install since I make everything read only at boot and not have to worry about when the power goes out.

I was gonna recommend Arch linux (basically the binary form of Gentoo), but I don't suppose that processor has i686 support does it?

[beakmyn]

I was gonna recommend Arch linux (basically the binary form of Gentoo), but I don't suppose that processor has i686 support does it?

Ah no. It's an original Pentium 166Mhz processor. I don't even think it has MMX.