Hi everyone,
I'm a total newb - know nothing about linux except that I love puppylinux.

I'm actually working on an art project and I have a very specific need for a laptop.

basically I have two older laptops that have a whopping 16mb of ram each with 70mhz processors.

All I need for the OS to do is turn on, accept a floppy with a jpg and display it.

Is there any easy way to configure this OS easily? or should I try to hire a programmer to do it for me?

cheers everyone
sleepkyng

There is no need to hire a programmer. What you want is a variation on a digital photoframe. muLinux is the distro of choice for this. Examples:http://likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.shtml

In fact: http://www.quepublishing.com/article...?p=377099&rl=1 looks like exactly what you want.

with MuLinux, i would install the distro and then make changes?

i want the gui to act so that when you start up, you have the option to turn the machine on or off, or look at ONE image from the floppy disk.

is that possible?

sorry, i know these questions are so thick, but your input really helps!


EDIT: woah, that is what i want. but all that code looks scary. I'll give it a shot this weekend!

Thats very limited.

The example I point out, you switch it on and you have options off, run slideshow, load more images (prompts for a floppy). This looks exactly like what you want. You can easily edit the supplied script to just display an image instead of running a slideshow.

OR: from the mulinux install with X11, you can get it to boot to rl3 and run a script first thing which presents a menu 1=shutdown 2=display image ... 1 executes halt; 2 attepts to mount a floppy, prompting if none found, displays the first image found (or slideshows more than one perhaps) with exit to menu on keypress. This is not hard. You could even do this with puppy.

What you are not going to get is a distro to do exactly what you want. This is on account of divine powers yet to be bestowed upon developers, yae, even unto those who are root/sysadmin. (Though some admins seem to display diabolic powers on occasion, but I digress.) The point is, you will always have to do some setup.

would it be easier to do this in puppy or mulinux - considering i have no familiarity with linux whatsoever.

Well... the link gives exact instructions for muLinux. However, it should be possible to convert the instructions to work with puppy. Basically, it's your call.

Note... this is not the only option. Most photoframe projects seem to use DSL. Google for digital photoframe linux and you'll find lots.