Hi guys,

I am looking for a way to make a 'presentation system' with a replaced pc.
A friend has a shop and they want to be able to present bargains and other information with some kind of slideshow.
I have seen such systems from a distance and I wonder if it would be possible to create something like this with some basic software.

Is there a way or an application in Linux which can play a folder with pictures as a slideshow without any, or at least much, user intervention on the system?
The pc is not gonna be physically reachable in an easy way since the screen will be mounted on a wall and the pc on a false ceiling.

I thought of automatically booting the system, configuring auto logon, if possible automatically playing the presentation and schedule a job to shut down.
By using samba, they would be able to replace the presentation (single file or content of a folder).

Since they only know windows/office, it has to be something which can be created/edited on windows.

Thanks a lot in advance for any ideas,

P.

Here's a development of your idea. "I thought of automatically booting the system, configuring auto logon, if possible automatically playing the presentation" After auto logon, use the desktop's autostart feature to run gqview with the -f and -s options and a path to a folder in a Windows share.

Regards Linux shutdown, it might be nice if the Windows users could initiate it. One way to do this would be to autostart a script on Linux that loops (with a sleep) checking for a marker file in a folder on the Windows share. When the file appears the script could delete it and shut down. The marker file creation could be done via a shortcut on a Windows desktop.

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Hi catkin, thank you very much for your input.
Sorry for not getting back to you earlier but it has been hectic over here so I didn't do anything regarding this issue.

I will give gqview a try one of these days and report back.

Regarding shutdown: I have a linux server myself which is stuffed in my storage room and I shut it down with putty in a script file.
The only problem is that after every +-30 times, I get that 'boot has been mounted x times without being checked, checking now' message and since I have everything on 1 partition and a 1,5TB disk, it takes quite some time to check the volume.
Since the store closes at the same time every day, I thought of scheduling a job so they don't have to consider it.
Is there a particular reason that you would leave this up to a person?

Something else: are you familiar with many linux distro's?
I was wondering which distro would be the best for this purpose and one that is as light as possible on resources.
Aside from automatic boot initialized by the BIOS, I thought of WOL and I know how to do this in windows but what about linux?

Your ideas are mostly appreciated! ;-)
P