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Hi,
I'm asking for suggestions on the following situation:
I have an very old laptop, a Compaq Aero 33/c, with 12 MB of RAM and a ~230 MB hard drive. I like this machine because of its small form factor. All I want to do with this machine is to have it continuously display jpeg images one after the other as in a slideshow. And I would like to use debian to do it.
My thoughts have been to install a basic, no frills version of debian, use PPP, add X, add a slideshow program and call it a day. Unfortunately, I can only get so far. The machine only has a floppy drive (no cd-rom drive) but does have access to the internet via an external 56k modem. So far I've been able to install potato 2.2r7 via floppies (this was before 3.0 came out) and I've been able to trim a little off of that using dselect (removing the telnet packages for example) to save on disk space. This leaves me with a functional linux system with the most basic commands, 70MB of hard drive space, and a working PPP connection to the internet.
So at this point I try to install X via apt-get install x-window-system and it tells me sure, I can do that, but it's going to take up the rest of your hard drive space (40 mb in .debs, 70 mb unpacked). This would leave no room for images or installing a slideshow program so I cancel it.
So what it boils down to is this:
1. Do I have to install X see images? 2. Will I have to install a window manager on top of X to see images? (or just use xdm, maybe answered my own question) 3. Is there an alternative to using the full X package that makes sense for my machine? I've seen some stuff about Nano-X, Tiny-X (purportedly included in XFree86 now anyway). These packages don't seem to be in debian stable via apt-get. Basically, I'd need gcc to compile XFree86 on this machine and I'm not sure I could get it on there without exhausting my hdd space first (don't know, haven't tried). Most frustrating part is that I can't seem to find any information on how to use/install/make work nano/tiny X. 4. I've seen some things on SVGA lib, but no details. Is that something that can help me here? What is it, how to use it/install it? 5. Am I going to just have to develop all this stuff on another machine and port the results over to this humble laptop?
TIA.
Drew |