Hello, all. This is my first post here. Please bear with me.

I have an old laptop I want to convert into a digital picture frame. If it works like I hope, I plan to give it to my mom - preloaded with pictures - for Christmas.

I plan on ditching the case (or most of it), keyboard, CD drive, floppy drive, battery, etc. The floppy drive and battery don't work anyway. I will leave the PS/2 and USB ports accessible for a keyboard and flash drive if I need to do any maintenance or add pictures in the future.

I can handle the physical hardware part. What I need help with is the software. I want to use Linux for efficiency and minimal use of hard drive space but have no idea what distribution I should use for this. All I want from it is to boot, automatically load the image viewing program, and start a slideshow with no user input. It should be able to handle loss of power

I should be able to install (from CD) and configure the OS and software, then strip the laptop down to its essential "picture frame" components.

What flavor of Linux should I use? What image program should I use? How do I configure Linux to boot, log in, and execute a program automatically?

I'm sure this topic has already been discussed in great detail, but my search attempts didn't pull up the info I needed. So if someone could point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.

And yes, I know I could just buy her a manufactured digital picture frame and be done with it... but where's the fun in that??

if you could get an autologin distro like mandriva or the likes...
use a slideshow for the background and it will boot then run the slide show as a background...
also remember the save features, and set them up the same...
or disable everything like screen saver and so forth...
the othert thing you can do is hide the task bar, you have timer features for it so use them...
that should do it...no intellectual output here..sorry...but you did say thats what you wanted...

Perhaps I should have added that I'm a complete Linux noob!

I installed Red Hat once a couple years ago. Played with it for about a week. And that's the extent of my Linux experience.

One of my main goals with this project is to become better acquainted with Linux.

*bump*

Really, I just want to be pointed in the right direction. I don't want it done for me. But I've no idea which distro would be best (I'm downloading Mandriva One as I type). And yes, "boot then run the slide show" is what I have in mind. But what runs the slide show? What graphics utility is the best for this? How is it automated? Save features? Timer features? I guess I'll look into that when I get Mandriva running...

I would use DOS, as in this example.

http://www.kevinfreitas.net/projects/digitalframe/

I did something similar with an IBM 750C laptop with a small HD and DOS 6.22. Worked great, however, you may have some problems getting the laptop to self-boot if the power fails. but with the Autoexec.bat file all you would need is to turn it on and the rest is automatic.

Even the smallest Linux distro is just to big for something like this...

KC

Thanks for the suggestion and link! You're probably right and DOS may be better solution for this project. So I'll have to come up with another excuse or project to learn Linux...

At the bottom of the page on the nice link that Kencaz gave you there is a link to a guy who used Damn Small Linux with step by step instructions. As a first step though you might consider getting another floppy drive and using DOS or FreeDos.