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 I knew this would be problematic because USB ports were released after Microsoft has long since withdrawn support for DOS.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: