[ale] Kiosk slideshow with reload

[Michael Trausch]

The flicker is caused by fbi doing ioctl to unset graphics mode on the try and restoring the text screen, followed by starting again and reissuing the graphics mode ioctl.  Can be witnessed even on modern machines.

You can however save slides in framebuffer format and use a c program or script of some sort to mmap the framebuffer and dump them one after another. Without translating pixels as a requirement, it's as fast as memcpy.

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 20, 2015, at 10:18 AM, Ted W. <ted-lists at xy0.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo