Puppy Linux for keeping my grandma up to date
Posted: Thu 01 May 2008, 13:04
Hi,
I have over 90 years old grandma and she has some problems keeping up with the current date and weekday. Otherways she has her sanity pretty well reserved, so I thought I have to do something to help her keeping up to date.
Hardware:
I have one really flat 15" LCD display and one small Compaq P3 1GHz machine with 512MB ram. I want to keep it as quitet as possible so I removed the hard drive and boot the system from CD and save all the data to 256MB USB stick. The machine won't boot from the USB, not even with WakePup2. Other distros like DSL was able to boot from USB with a boot floppy, but those were using Linux boot floppy instead of Puppy's DOS one.
The idea:
My initial idea is to autostart web browser to fullscreen and show three lines of very big white text at the screen on black background. First line will be date, second is the day of the week and the third one will be 24H clock. To this point I think I won't have any problems of doing my little project, but I have other plans as well...
There is one analog telephone line and no internet connection available. I have considered to put the computer to call to the internet once per day and download one small text file from my home page which could include for example greetings from her relatives. These greetings would be shown every now and then at the display.
The problem:
I know PHP/MySQL, JavaScript and HTML pretty well but I don't have too much experience of Linux or other Unix systems. I have played a little with some linux boxes but I feel very handicapped with it due my lack of knowledge. Puppy Linux seems to be a very intresting and well polished small distro and I'd like to use it to this project.
How I can make Puppy Linux to call to the Internet once per day, download one text file, sync its time with NTP servers and immediately after that drop the connection? How I can make sure it won't call to internet at any other cases than this daily text file download?
I also have some problems to get the browser starting up automatically, but this one I think I can solve by myself...
I have over 90 years old grandma and she has some problems keeping up with the current date and weekday. Otherways she has her sanity pretty well reserved, so I thought I have to do something to help her keeping up to date.
Hardware:
I have one really flat 15" LCD display and one small Compaq P3 1GHz machine with 512MB ram. I want to keep it as quitet as possible so I removed the hard drive and boot the system from CD and save all the data to 256MB USB stick. The machine won't boot from the USB, not even with WakePup2. Other distros like DSL was able to boot from USB with a boot floppy, but those were using Linux boot floppy instead of Puppy's DOS one.
The idea:
My initial idea is to autostart web browser to fullscreen and show three lines of very big white text at the screen on black background. First line will be date, second is the day of the week and the third one will be 24H clock. To this point I think I won't have any problems of doing my little project, but I have other plans as well...
There is one analog telephone line and no internet connection available. I have considered to put the computer to call to the internet once per day and download one small text file from my home page which could include for example greetings from her relatives. These greetings would be shown every now and then at the display.
The problem:
I know PHP/MySQL, JavaScript and HTML pretty well but I don't have too much experience of Linux or other Unix systems. I have played a little with some linux boxes but I feel very handicapped with it due my lack of knowledge. Puppy Linux seems to be a very intresting and well polished small distro and I'd like to use it to this project.
How I can make Puppy Linux to call to the Internet once per day, download one text file, sync its time with NTP servers and immediately after that drop the connection? How I can make sure it won't call to internet at any other cases than this daily text file download?
I also have some problems to get the browser starting up automatically, but this one I think I can solve by myself...