Walltop
WallTop computers... recycle an old laptop by removing all the extraneous parts such as the cdrom drive, floppy drive, (dead) battery and then hanging it on the wall.
I am building one from an old Dell Inspiron 3700.
Operating system
I looked at using Debian, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux (which immediately panics on boot), and Movix. I decided I might as well stick with Ubuntu so I am building a custom Live CD. I will then transfer it to a Compact Flash card, which will be plugged into an adapter and replace the incredibly noisy stock 4200 rpm hard drive.
See http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-customize-your-ubuntu-live-cd
Oh! This was a bad idea. Much stuff about Ubuntu live cd's has been deleted from this page!
The way to do this is Debian Live!
After installing the live-cd packages on my Ubuntu based build host
lh_clean --binary lh_config -b usb-hdd -k 686 --bootstrap-flavour minimal\ --packages-lists "stripped" --binary-indices disabled\ --memtest "disabled"\ --packages "x-window-system-core fluxbox\ openssh-server vlc gnash portmap nfs-common\ autofs debconf-english"\ --bootappend-live "nolocales" --syslinux-timeout 50
I build on a 64 bit machine so I have to say -k 686 to get the 32 bit kernel
Add scripts to config/chroot_local-hooks
02-fix_inittab.sh - changes runlevel to 5 and adds the tty7 login line so I have only one login running instead of default 5
40-bash_profile.sh - append or create a .bash_profile script that will run a script from nfs and then do a 'startx'.
50-windowmanager.sh - configures fluxbox startup files
99-make-export.sh - make the directories needed for autofs
Add files to config/chroot_local-includes I add the autofs.* files that I use to mount nfs servers.
Doing customizations, do this
lh_config lh_bootstrap lh_chroot lh_chroot_hosts install lh_chroot_resolv install lh_chroot_proc install chroot chroot #do the hacks here lh_chroot_hosts remove lh_chroot_resolv remove lh_chroot_proc remove lh_binary
instead of
lh_build
Copy image to CF: dd if=binary.img of=${USBSTICK}
To test image, start in qemu or convert img file to a vmdk and use vmware
To use in walltop, transfer CF to laptop and boot it
Customization that I might want to do
other codecs??? emacs21-nox libcurl3 realplayer? firefox - use iceweasel, unless like me your laptop is puny, then forget it! flash - use gnash??
I need something to do a slide show of pictures, driven from command line. Image-magick supports this.
Starting X / fluxbox without a window manager http://www.debianadmin.com/how-to-auto-login-and-startx-without-a-display-manager-in-debian.html
