Hello Jogglers! Photoframe question?

[pukington]

Good evening all, my first visit to your spot on the web!

I came across a Joggler on ebay at a silly price from a rather strange route.

I'm after a photoframe that works wirelessly and can access a network storage device for its pictures. Its not for me but my old man, he's a keen photographer and regularly travels and i'm sure like everyone else with a half decent digital camera takes zillions of pics and never looks at them. Well, needless to say a couple of years ago he was scared of losing them so for his birthday i bought him a Synology nas box, its a really natty bit of kit that we all love dearly. He stores all his pics on it, all in jpg form. I've trolled the webs for a photoframe with network ability for the last year or so, and closest i've come is a kodak one that can grab pics off flckr and rss etc, but not from network.

I did some more googling and found a device called a joggler, and soon found versions of ubunto etc.

But!
I can't find any photoframe software that runs via network. Which is rather annoying. I'm not new to the word of linux but my use isnt recent so am relearning a fair bit.

Having ended up here and dome some searching i still haven't solved my concern, i'm sure i'm not the only one out there thats after such functionality and am hoping this is the right place to ask for some helpfull advice!

Many thanks for any replies, any pointers are trully appreciated!

[BuZz]

if you are running linux, you can mount a cifs (windows networking) drive directly on the filesystem, so any software can access the files there. so really you just need to find yourself a screensaver or slideshow application you like, and point it to the network mount.

this might interest you also (shows the sort of things you can do with just a little tweaking): having a slideshow pick up emails mailed to a specific email address - http://www.jogglerwiki.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=70

ps. as well as storing the photos on the nas, do you keep backups elsewhere?

[pukington]

Buzz, thanks so much for your response, that's a really good suggestion! I'll start looking into it a little more.

And yes, i suggest pictures are booked up onto a solid storage, ie dvd, as any hdd can fail, i learnt that the bad way as i'm sure everyone has at somepoint! Whether he does i dont know.

I'm liking the joggler, what a nifty bit of kit, i'd never heard of it before the start of this week, amazed it had passed me by!

[guidows]

export a samba share from the Synology, mount it in the joggler, with linux. Then you can use xscreensaver-glslideshow if you have the selected images in just one folder or also you can install picasa for linux and configure it to show all your folder with pictures previously mounted


For xscreensaver, follow the next instructions (assuming the pictures copied or folder mounted in /home/joggler/pictures)

vi /home/joggler/.xscreensaver
imageDirectory: /home/joggler/pictures
sudo su
vi /usr/share/applications/screensavers/glslideshow.desktop
Exec=glslideshow -root -duration 15 -pan 15 -fade 5
rm /usr/share/applications/desktop.en_GB.utf8.cache
cd
rm .xscreensaver-getimage.cache

configure xscreensaver with xscreensaver-demo

[pukington]

Evening all.

Sorry for never coming back and passing on my thanks, i've only just moved back to my parents to install this device. Its working well, have no problems, thanks to Guidows as his use of xscreensaver suggested works a treat, having mounted a folder on my synology disk station i can update photo's etc perfectly.

But, this has now got me thinking, what a natty little device this thing is!

Having been looking at this forum, which is a great wealth of information i'm pondering on whether this is possible?

I want this for my parents, my dad is good with computers, much i've taught him over the years, but linux is a bit of a stretch for him. He has a nice stereo in the front room that has a digital input, i'm tempted to either retrofit or link to an external soundcard and output to this stereo. Now the Joggler in its native form obviously has the digital streams etc, i'd like to be able to have a front end in place, buttons to simply press to output a digital radio station, have a photoframe, and/or have pretty mp3 support, once again from another mounted network drive.

Is there something out there, some form of front end or os that covers my wants?

I appreciate any input from you guys, many thanks!

[verg0]

If you want to listern to digital radio stations just install squeezeplay on the joggler, you can also play your local mp3s with a squeezebox too...

[pete]

You could too just make it a UPNP player with the Linux front end to your NAS.

[guidows]

SqueezePlay for touch control is perfect and Squeezebox server can be used not only with the joggler.
I don't know a good UPNP player for linux but xbmc, but this one is some slow.

[gegs]

... He has a nice stereo in the front room that has a digital input, i'm tempted to either retrofit or link to an external soundcard and output to this stereo...

Search for 'USB soundcard' and 'asound.conf' on the forum. You can output digital sound to the USB port by using a modified asound.conf file and route it through a USB soundcard with optical out - that's what I do on my hi-fi set-up.

Plug'n'Pimp has USB soundcard switches that you can apply using a web interface for the stock OS; you can also manually apply the new asound.conf file in Ubuntu or the stock OS.

I don't know about the slideshow part of your question, but I admit you've piqued my interest.

[pukington]

Thanks for the input chaps, i'll take a gander and peruse further. I did take a look at xbmc and thought that may solve my problems, i bought my joggler and it had a usb with a linux distro on it, 11.04 natty i believe, this had both squeezeplay and xbmc already installed.

Having played with xbmc i thought it would solve my initial query of a photoframe slideshow, in which it did, until i realised i couldnt exit the slideshow once it had started (dont know if i'm being daft, but tap the screen and nothing happens). I saw your post gegs in regards to external soundcard and had already started taking a google for a cmedia driven kit.

Can a Joggler boot off a usb hub? Be it powered or not? As only one usb slot makes things awkward, unless i find a decent readme on how to hack another one onboard, although i dont know if i trust myself!

[gegs]

Can a Joggler boot off a usb hub? Be it powered or not? As only one usb slot makes things awkward, unless i find a decent readme on how to hack another one onboard, although i dont know if i trust myself!

Yes, it certainly can. I've got a 4 port hub (non-powered) with a USB soundcard, a bluetooth receiver for a wireless mouse, a USB-powered speaker and a Seagate Expansion 250gb external hard drive.

The Seagate has my Ubuntu ext4 distro on it, which I grew to about 30gb using Live Gparted on my Windows PC. The rest is FAT32 formatted and is used for movies. I've set up the FAT32 partition as a samba share and use the Joggler as a NAS to stream media to my jailbroken Apple TV2.

It's a versatile little box thanks to BuZz, spoyser, roobarb, gforums et al who saw the device's potential and shared their wonderful modifications.

[Mx560]

So if I send audio to usb port , does it still work as a normal usb port ? can I add a hub (is a powered one better)
and use a usb soundcard and a usb stick with my media on it ?

[gegs]

So if I send audio to usb port , does it still work as a normal usb port ? can I add a hub (is a powered one better)
and use a usb soundcard and a usb stick with my media on it ?

Yes!

Powered hub only necessary if the Joggler won't fire up one of your devices. My non-powered hub has... (read my previous post).