[ale] Kiosk slideshow with reload

[Alex Carver]

On 2015-05-20 07:18, Ted W. 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.
> 

I gave that a shot, I like the ability to avoid using X at all but even
on a fairly fast laptop (Core 2 2.33GHz) the screen still flashes to the
console on each cycle.  I also discovered that there's another fork of
fbi called FIM which seems to have some other options.  I'll have to
experiment with that, too, and see what I can do.