[ale] Kiosk slideshow with reload

Alex Carver agcarver+ale at acarver.net
Wed May 20 10:04:18 EDT 2015


On 2015-05-20 02:43, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
> On 05/19/2015 10:28 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
>> Yeah, I know I can use a Pi, the NUC was the "only if I have to install
>> something heavy like Gnome" option.  Otherwise it's going to be whatever
>> Raspbian's desktop is or Fluxbox/Xfce.  I'll check out geeqie.  The main
>> thing is to be able to drop a file in a directory from a remote machine
>> and have it be incorporated into the slideshow automatically.
> 
> Sounds like a trivial perl script to me.
> 
> #!/usr/bin/env perl
> 
> # Yes, I know this is bad/unsafe for odd filenames.
> my @files=`ls -1 ~/Pictures/Best/*g`;
> 
> # pick a randome file
> my $bg = $files[rand @files];
> 
> `env DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/feh --bg-scale $bg` ;
> 
> There is probably a bash way too.  I run this from crontab every 30 min to
> change the desktop background. You could easily wrap the important parts in a
> while/sleep loop.

I'll give that a shot but I think I also found a hook in the feh source
that would let me fire off a reload with a signal (dormant code that
needs to be enabled and cleaned).

>> Looks like the rotate option covers X11 but what about the kernel itself?
> 
> What does the kernel care about rotation? I'm confused and don't understand.
> 
> 

The monitor will be the system's only monitor therefore the kernel/shell
console needs to be upright when the monitor is mounted to the wall
turned 90 degrees.  If I don't rotate the kernel/shell it makes reading
any boot messages or working from the console much harder (and a strain
on my neck holding my head sideways :) )  In short, I need the whole
system to think that a 16x9 monitor is really a 9x16 monitor because
that's how it's going to be mounted.


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