I am working on a project to make a photo frame using Raspberry pi and my old Desktop screen. I got slide show of pics using commands shown below but I cant make it automatically work as photo frame. Each time I reboot the Pi I need to put commands again. As it shown in commands help section, when we put lat command and reboot it will no longer be a computer and will start showing slide show and that is the point where I stuck. Can anyone help me!!
Step-1: Install Debian, basic Xorg server and fluxbox. I have installed light weight fluxbox also for other functionalities proposed for future.
Step-2: Install qiv. qiv is a nice open source image viewer, very much suitable – customizable – for Photo frame functionality.
# apt-get install x11-xserver-utils qiv
Step-3: Create a normal user. Include the above line in ~/.fluxbox/startup of this user just above “exec fluxbox” line. If you don’t want fluxbox, you can use .xinitrc to do the following stuff.
xset -display :0.0 s off &
qiv -f -s -i -t -r -u -d 5 /home/nas/laptop/blackgod/Pictures
The xset command disables blank screensaver, which is essential for Slide show.
The next qiv command is the core slide show program. Note down the absence of & at end of this line, which prohibits running fluxbox desktop, which is not necessary for a photo frame. The last argument is the path of photos. Here is the break-up of argument to qiv.
-f full screen
-s slide show
-i disable status bar
-u recursively get photos from directory given
-t fit image size to screen size
-r randomize slide show
-d <sec> slide show delay
At this stage, when you start X with startx command, your slide show should start. Now we need to automatically start x and login as normal user and start slide show when the system is power on. This can be done by following step.
Step-4: To get better display life and conserve some power, I enable the Display Power Management System (DPSM) at 10PM and disable it at 8AM daily with this cron tab settings. Create a file called “slideshow” in /etc/cron.d/ as root user with the following content.
0 8 * * * <username> /usr/bin/xset -display :0.0 dpms force on
0 22 * * * <username> /usr/bin/xset -display :0.0 dpms force off
The first line disables the DPMS at 8AM and second line enables it at 10PM.
In case you have any problem with “dpms force off”, you can try with “dpms force suspend” or “dpms force standby” also.
Step-5: Modify the /etc/initab with following lines as shown below.
id:5:initdefault:
x:5:once:/bin/su <username> -l -c “/bin/bash –login -c /usr/bin/startx > /dev/null 2>&1″
The above lines set default init level as 5. In default init level 5, we start X server for your normal user.
Step-6: Reboot to get your Digital Photo Frame ready.
Here is my Photo frame powered by QNAP TS-110. This is a bonus functionality of my NAS/backup server