The next problem is installing Puppy on the CF card.
After looking around a little, the installer was right there in the Setup menu. And the choice was pretty clear:
Woops Can’t Find the Files.
You would think that the correct choice would be CD in this case, but this fails with an error saying that it can’t find the files.
The problem is that the CDROM is not mounted as the system boots from it. So all you have to do is click the button on the right of the CDROM to mount the device so it looks like the following. At this point the CD choice will work correctly. Perhaps the correct way to do this is to mount the CD before running the installer to avoid the error completely.
When it finds the files, you get the following dialog.
Do nothing was the right choice here, but for a while I got confused and tried something else. But I backed out before actually writing anything funny on the CF card.
Finally the installation started:
And then I booted it and it ran just fine:
After booting the system and making some changes, I triggered a reboot and it asked if I wanted to save the settings. The size it suggested was 512MB, which seemed pretty large, but apparently what it wants to do is save a squashed file system. Later on I reinstalled Puppy on a 512MB card and reduced the size of the saved file to 64MB and it worked just fine. I’m not clear at this point what is actually saved in that file system. But for the photo-frame application, it works just fine with a 64MB saved size.
Once the settings are saved, the state of the system is written to that file every time you shutdown the system. I’m not even clear on how to cause another save file to be created. But every change you make is now saved when you shut down the system gracefully. Here are some things you will want to change for a Photo Frame application:
- Disable the ScreenSaver and Energy saving in Menu>>Desktop>>Gxset.
- Change the background from the default Woof Woof using Menu>>Desktop>>PuppyDesktopBackground Image
- Run GTKSee graphics application, which is what I use for the slide show, and set the background, slide duration and other settings. Then exit the program cleanly to save the settings.
- And any date and time zone settings.
When you’ve made all your changes, just use Menu>>Shutdown>>Restart to save your settings. This time you will not be asked about a save file and all your settings will be the same after reboot.
So there it is. A Blue-Diamond running Puppy Linux to make a photo frame from a 17″ LCD Monitor. I’ll look into what it takes to run other programs or make changes to the Slide Show program in the future. But for now, problem solved.
The final CF Flash drive usage was about 165MB including the 64MB save file, so the Puppy Linux system only takes about 100MB of flash space. Amazing for what you get.
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