Scripted Photo Frame ?

[Headworx]

Hi,

I have a plug with a USB Mimo monitor connected to it. Now I need an application that would display a jpg image periodically pulled from a web server.

At the moment it is working using GUI and Firefox browser in full screen mode to display an auto-refreshing web page containing the image. But the entire gui / firefox is an overkill and I do nto know how to automate the startup of all necessary components. My thinking is the described scenario can be done in a much simpler way... like a bash script with a loop containing wget to pull the jpg and then some other command (any ideas?) to render the image...

Any comments / suggestions on the above are welcome

Cheers,
Headworx

[fragfutter]

Code:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -u

wget -q <url> -O /tmp/image.jpg
qiv -T -f /tmp/image.jpg
while True; do
   wget -q <url> -O /tmp/image.jpg
   sleep 60
done

adapt as needed

[Headworx]

Thanks for your quick reply... That is exactly what I was looking for, but unfortunately qiv complains:

Gdk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

I remember several months ago I had some graphics apps running without full system gui, but cannot recall the setup now...

[Trune]

i got a similar error with Conky, i had to specify what display to send it too, and also install X and other required software.

[Headworx]

Yes, it runs fine when executed from xfce. But for a simple task like rendering a JPG image, I'd rather have something that can run without X. So the question is if there is an image renderer that runs without X?

[fragfutter]

you need a graphical display to show images. Current linux system would use X11 for that, so you need a running X11 Server. As an alternative (if the Mimo supports it) you can use a linux framebuffer device. An image viewer for that would be fbi (google fbida)

[Headworx]

Thanks for the FBI tip, I have just tried this but nothing shows on the screen... meaning the framebuffer is probably not working... it only says [map: vt01 => fb0]... so back to the xfce...

[snake]

Hmm... I was thinking a similar idea (mimo photoframe) but my approach was to utilize the screensaver GLSlideshow and just dump the pictures unto a certain directory. Haven't really explored this yet but I saw that my xfce4+mimo+plugcomputer setup shows a potential for this.... 

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#slideshow