I’ve finally completed a project that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time – create a music server for my home.

Using an old computer, a copy of Ubuntu and an open-source PHP jukebox application called Jinzora I’ve created a server that’s connected to my stereo. It can be controlled from any computer within my home network. Alternatively, it will stream tracks to any client on the network so I could listen to something completely different to someone else. :)

The tedious part was putting all of my CDs on it. Each track needed to be in a particular file structure (Genre->Artist->Album->Tracks) and unfortunately my music collection is a bit of a mess, spread across drives and folders with no discernibile structure. Oops.

I did toy with the idea of making it accessible to the Internet so that I could connect, log-in and listen to my collection when I was out of the house but I didn’t really fancy the security risk of exposing the server to the outside world.

Still to do: The computer I used has the generic beige finish so I’d like to take off the case top and facia and spray them black so it looks nicer. I wonder if I’ll ever get around to it? ^^

After what feels like a roller-coaster ride of research and experimentation I now have a working slideshow on the still-in-one-piece laptop.

The operating system

In the end I decided to go for DOS. I installed the system files from a Win98 boot disk that I still had (I still have a license to use it too). I figured that, while Linux has its attractions, all I want is a slideshow that I could turn on and off as required. This more or less ruled out Linux because I couldn’t be bothered to make a stripped-down distro to save space on the internal drive. Ultimately the risk of turning off the machine without shutting-down a bucket load of daemons is something I don’t have to worry about with DOS. It feels kind of cool using DOS again. It felt like an old friend. :-D

The slideshow application

Once I’d settled for DOS I needed to find a suitable program to use for the Slideshow. I bumped into an application called LXPic which fills my needs perfectly. It’s small, it’s fast and it’s highly configurable. It’s not just a slideshow – it’s a picture viewer that happens to have a more-than-adequate slideshow feature included in it.

Image storage media

Now that I’ve got the system booting nicely from the Compact Flash card, I didn’t really want to have to keep removing the card to put images on it. Fortunately the system has a USB port so I looked into somehow using that in DOS. I knew this would be problematic because USB ports were released after Microsoft has long since withdrawn support for DOS. In the end, through experimentation, searching the net and patience I got lucky. I can now access compact flash cards using the USB port – allowing me to use seperate media from the boot card.

My plan is to mount a USB/CF reader to the side of the wooden frame to allow media to be easily removed and updated.

All that remains

All that remains is to strip down the laptop to its bare essentials (goodbye plastic casing, noisy fans and failed hardware) and mount it in the wooden frame. That’s the part where, if I slip up it could all go wrong. I should be okay. I’ve been inside a number of working laptops and returned them to their previous condition when I’d finished so I can’t imagine this one will be any worse… :-?

I was planning on leaving that until I’m on holiday but I suspect I might not be able to resist cracking it open this weekend. :lol:

I’ve found the frame! Hooray!

I popped into town this morning (mainly to get some milk and bread) and I thought I’d have a quick look around for a wooden frame for my digital frame project.

As look would have it, I found a nice deep 10″x12″ oak frame in Wilkinson’s for only £7. And with the recent VAT reduction, it only cost me £6.85! Hooray!

It’s almost exactly the right size for the LCD panel. I’ll just need to put a card mount in the front and fix the LCD panel in place with perhaps foam or wood along the inside edges.

More thoughts about operating systems

I was thinking about the OS for the frame and it occurred to me that while Puppy Linux works great in the frame, why don’t I look at using FreeDOS instead? I’ve written low-level graphics programs in the past and all my photo frame really needs to do is show a slideshow of images.

If I used FreeDOS (it requires about 2Mb of memory) and wrote a custom slideshow app to run in DOS myself then there’d be more RAM and storage space for the images.

This would limit me to images only (no video for example) and I’d have to write each image type handler myself… is it worth the extra effort? The hardware does have 128Mb of RAM and the CF card can be replaced with a larger one if necessary.

I received a new toy in the post today that I ordered from E-Bay. It’s an IDE to CF converter. It plugs into the standard ribbon cable of a laptop and allows me to connect a Compact Flash card instead of a 2.5″ disk drive.

Needless to say, being solid state memory, it doesn’t make the noise a HDD makes and it certainly doesn’t use the power.

I installed Puppy Linux onto an old 256Mb CF card I had lying around and installed it (using the converter) into the defunct laptop that I’m going to use for my digital media frame.

Hooray! It works. The next step is to make my own distro based upon Puppy so I can remove all the applications that I don’t need and speed up the boot process.

I’m excited. Why? Because I have in my possession a knackered laptop.

You’d think this wouldn’t be a cause for joy but I’ve got over the dissapointment (it’s only a PIII 500MHz with 64Mb of RAM) and now I’m thinking outside the box.

What could I do with a knackered laptop? I mean – normally I wouldn’t dream of doing anything interesting with a working laptop other than try to find it a new home with a loving owner. But a broken laptop screams possibilities!

So, I’ve been thinking that I quite like those digital picture frames that seem all the rage right now. You know – the ones that have really tiny screens and a crap resolution of 400 pixels across or whatever. Being the geek I am, I’ve even thought I’d quite like one until I’ve thought about how crap the screen is.

So… imagine a digital photo frame with a 14″ screen and a resolution of 1024×768. :)  I know I am.  I think it would look pretty good, sitting on the shelf showing pictures of my beloved and other nice things to look at.

I’m thinking that if I rip out all the bits that don’t work (DVD drive and hard drive are both knackered and would cost far too much to replace anyway) and mount it in the back of a deep picture frame it might just work out.

The big catch is that the laptop won’t boot from USB. I’ve tried. It doesn’t even have an option in its CMOS. I may have to end up getting a cheap HDD for it. And I’ll have to figure out how to get around the non-functional CD-ROM. I wonder if the optical ribbon has come loose?

In the end, it’s broken anyway so I don’t have much to lose although that doesn’t mean I won’t be careful. :)