[ale] Kiosk slideshow with reload

[Ted W.]

On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 07:04:18AM -0700, Alex Carver wrote:
> 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).

Check out a program called fbi (Frame Buffer Imageviewer). I've been
playing with it and it looks like you can get an auto-refreshing
slideshow with the following:

  while true; do
    find /image/dir -iname "*.png" -exec \
	  fbi -noverbose -a -t $TIMEOUT -1 {} \;
  done

The only possible problem is that, on my older system here, I get a
flicker of the console between images. This may just be that my system
is ~10 years old. I'd be interested to see how it works on a newer
system.

An added advantage here is that there is no Xserver requirement.

-- 
Ted Wood <ted-lists at xy0.org>
Registered GNU/Linux user #413569