January 24, 2008 Filed in:
Emulators | SoftwareI’m gearing up for a Digital Photo Frame 2.0. I’d love to use an old iBook that can run Leopard. It’s too bad I don’t have an old Mac I can use. I’ve looked on eBay and I can’t bring myself to spend $100 on a Mac that I’m just going to rip apart. So, basically what I’m going to do is take my current Digital Picture Frame and rebuild it into a smaller enclosure.
This time around I’m going to rid myself of Windows and install Linux. Suse has always been a favorite of mine, so it seemed logical to downloaded their most recent offering: openSuse 10.3. I installed it into Fusion to see if it can do out-of-the-box exactly what I need it to do.
It’s pretty nice. It’s a lot more user friendly than the last version I used. It looks like all that cash from Novell paid off.
Anyway, here’s how the install went:
I’ve always admired the installers for Linux. They have always been at least 10 years ahead of Windows.
![Pasted Graphic 271](pasted-graphic-271suse.jpg)
I’ll spare you the details of the installer. There’s definitely no shortage of configuration options. I was OK in just hitting Next, Next, Next.
![Pasted Graphic 272](pasted-graphic-272suse.jpg)
12 minutes later, the installer had finished doing its thing.
![Pasted Graphic 273](pasted-graphic-273suse.jpg)
Nice boot up screen.
![Pasted Graphic 274](pasted-graphic-274suse.jpg)
I was very impressed by the fact that thing this booted up in about 10 seconds, and it’s in a Virtual Machine. I can’t wait to see how it runs on the Digital Photo Frame. After all, the photo frame is a Pentium 4 @ 2.2 GHz.
![Pasted Graphic 275](pasted-graphic-275suse.jpg)
One of the default screensavers that it comes with is more than adequate for my needs. Since I had no problems moving photos from a USB thumb drive to this installation, it’s safe to say I can go ahead and install it on the Digital Photo Frame.
![Pasted Graphic 276](pasted-graphic-276suse.jpg)
I installed the new Elisa Media Center application. It’s the closest I can get to Front Row. What a pain! About 80 packagies/dependencies and 250 Megs later I got it running. For some reason it runs like a dog and is unusable in Fusion. (Probably the VM video card.)
![Pasted Graphic 277](pasted-graphic-277suse.jpg)
I installed openSuse 10.3 on the laptop without any problems. However, Elisa refuses to install. All the dependencies fail for some reason. If I can’t get it to work, I’ll stick with the default screensaver. I hope I can get it to work. I was looking forward to building in an IR receiver and using an Apple remote with it.