Digital Photo Frame based on TinyCore

• Long time requirement to have a DPF of my own.
• Requirement:
• Reasonably big in size 14 inch or beyond, not like the bad resolution DPFs for lesser cost or the higher resolution ones where one has to sell his/her soul.
• Try and reuse older hardware that I can get as freebie or throw away.
• Got an Emcore i511 board, pentium class SBC (single board computer) with 256 MB CF, 64MB RAM and VGA with 1024x768 resolution. Also got a 14 inch complimentary frame. The SBC runs on 5V DC and consumes about 5-10Watts.
• Wanted to run LFS, but compilation and trials would take too much time.
• Found Tinycore. Runs of very low resource machines, including a 486 and Xwindows. 
• Used unetbootin to write the tinycore.iso to the Compact Flash
• Basically uses a new kernel and a ramdisk to run the whole OS. Everything is run from RAM. Harddisk installs are also supported.
• After booting followed the howto from the Tinycore site and created a few native Linux partitions on the same CF and copied the kernel and the tinycore ramdisk. Installed grub by making the required changes. Grub boots the machine.
• Applications can be chosen via the applications manager. Using qiv as an image viewer because of the low resource requirements.
• Installed dropbear via a similar method.
• Tried to auto mount my USB stick that contained all the pics by various methods.
• Making entries in tc-config. But this is not useful for programs that have to wait for X.
• Made changes in /home/tc/.X.d and added scripts to run the qiv imageviewer and to point dropbear to a well-known place for the keys. These scripts are run after X starts.
• The Backup option has to be selected via the X menu for reboot/shutdown else the changes to the default user's home directory /home/tc will not be visible on the next boot.
• Changes can be made in the default initramdisk by extracting the original one by cpio -i -H newc < inputfile.cpio and after extracting make the needed changes and run find directory | cpio -o -H newc > outputfile.cpio. Gzip it and point this to the kernel's initrd.
• Until a better image is found, this is how the DPF looks.