I have an old laptop that I am turning into a digital picture frame. It's a 363MHz Pentium II CPU and 256MB RAM. No network interface USB 1.1, cd-rom will be taken out, once the os is installed. screen resolution can be either 800x600 or 1024x768.

I've stripped all the parts out and am working on assembling them to make it look more like a picture frame that can sit on a coffee table or end table. That part is going pretty good and now I'm ready to move on to the OS.

Does anyone know of a distro that would work for my project? It should probably have a lightweight graphic environment like windowviewer (or another) as well as a slideshow that can run through jpegs and/ore avi/mpeg files.

I do have some experience with linux, but have not tackled building one from scratch and am not even sure how to start with doing that and don't really want to unless there's no alternative.

Advice and/or links will be much appreciated. Thanks.

Well as it's not going to be doing anything massive (like blowing your friend's mind off with huge transparent desktop cadgets), I suggest a small/low-weight distribution. There are several alternatives, but from my own experience I'd try either Zenwalk or Slackware, with only those packages installed that are needed (you don't do much with bluetooth cadgets unless you've got those and are planning to use them). As simple a window manager as possible, you'll find loads of those from the web if they don't look good that are on the Slack discs. And some very simple picture-rolling program that's also found from the web - it's ok if they need to be built from source, since Slack can easily do it

EDIT: and Slack or Zenwalk because they are easy to configure and set up. For example Fedora would do just fine, but Slack just is easier to configure for a thing like this, if you ask me.

Thanks for the reply. I'll download slackware today and see what kind of mess I can conjure up. Although I don't like that I have to download six CDs to install a minimal os.
Is there a light version of slackware (iso only), with just a window manager and other programs?

Slackware is only 2 cds at the most