Does KDE or Gnome have a simple screensaver that can sequentially display about 500 pictures? I am trying to make a LCD picture frame out of an old laptop. I would like it to turn on at 7:45am and turn off at 5:05pm. That isn't hard. I would like it to auto-login to the OS. Easy. I would like the screensaver to come on after 1 minute. Should be easy. And I would like to go through a list of pictures that would be in a folder, one every 30 minutes. The screensaver would have to remember what picture it left off on from day to day. This is the part I am not sure about. I could do this in a few minutes in Windows 2000, but I could be legal and use Linux. What should I do? What Linux OS would be the smallest/easiest to setup? I want to be able to plug it in and forget about it. Thanks.

You could easily set up an empty desktop and get something like KDE or Gnome to rotate the background image every 30 minutes.... You could probably set up the vidwhacker or webcollage screensavers to do similar. Try running xscreensaver-demo and see what you have installed.

Check out the Movix distribution. I don't know exactly how to do the slideshow, but Movix seems to support it. Movix does use MPlayer, and I know how to do this from the command line with mplayer. To play all PNGs in the current directory, looping forever, fullscreen, with a 5 second delay, one would do "mplayer mf://*.png -fs -loop 0 -sstep 5". While potentially a little more difficult than 3Dave's solution, it's much more minimal. GNOME or KDE would run horribly on a 133/40.

You don't want to run KDE or GNOME or even any window manager or screensaver programme since they won't give you the stateful behaviour you want anyway. You should just create a simple .xinitrc script and use qiv or feh to display the pictures.

Oops...didn't notice the specs! If you use either the -vo vesa or -vo svga options with mplayer you don't even need to be running X. Better still, make sure you have svgalib installed and use seejpeg from console, it even has a slideshow funtion, eg to rotate every 30 minutes: $ seejpeg -s 1800 /path/to/pictures/*

Heh! - Is someone going to suggest doing it all in the bootloader splash next? ;)

That's not a bad idea!=o) How about using eMovix and boot straight into mplayer from a CD, no need to have a hard drive etc....(http://movix.sourceforge.net/)