Small linux distro for displaying advertisements/banners

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hi guys (& ladies) :slight_smile:
I'm looking for some good linux distribution to use on my new project.
The project looks like this:

  • tiny computer (ethernet, D-sub, usb, etc),
  • big-screen monitor (min 40'').
    All it has to do is to display some .swf advertisement in fullscreen mode. (plus some extra features like automatic checking for new ads, etc).

For now I'm using Ubuntu server 10.04 with Xorg, and gnash for playing flash files, but I don't know if it's right path to follow.

I'd like to use the smallest and fastest possible distribution which will do the job.

Any ideas are welcome :slight_smile:
Thx & Greetings.

2

using the known distribution / family is better than searching for a suitable small distribution..

IMHO, If you know / used ubuntu / debian family systems earlier and have some experience, then it is good to stay in it.. bcoz if you go for some other flavor though most of them are similar - you will have spend time in finding out what is the proper method to do that .... blah blah blah !

3

Thanks.
I think I'll probably stick to it.

But for now I found some new issues:

  • gnash is pretty slow. Adobe's flashplayer is much more efficient.
  • without any window manager it's hard to 'fullscreen' flashplayer, so I've added openbox.
  • when display is rotated (verticaly) any mouse movement causes crash of Xorg.
  • I can't disable mouse (or mouse cursor) in Xorg.

:slight_smile:

4

The choice of distro depends on your hardware. If you only have 256MB RAM and a slow processor, then you need something very lightweight. But since you are already running ubuntu pretty smoothly, i don't see a reason to switch.
As for your performance issues:
Check out this site SCALE 8x: Gnash, the free Flash player [LWN.net] Among other things it says:

Which are you using?
Are you running gnash standalone or as a browser plugin? If a plugin, which browser?

But there are limits to how fast the flash can be played, flash usually cannot utilize hardware acceleration. Do you need to run your ads in flash format? How about converting it into an mpeg (using e.g. ffmpeg) and running that with mplayer?

5

Ubuntu will do, but I've just switched to regular desktop with 'command-line install' option and just added xorg and openbox.
Ghash, which I used, was probably working on gstreamer, and as a standalone player - because I was trying to make it minimalistic :slight_smile:
I know about none hardware acceleration for flash, but unfortunately this is required format...
ffmpeg won't convert .swf file becasue of lacking support for 'compressed swf format' or whatever it's issue is.
So... I think I'm close, the only thing I don't like for now is setting fullscreen in adobe's flashplayer - I have to send Control+F with xsendkey...

Thanks and greetings.

Oh, and mouse cursor is disabled with 'unclutter'. :slight_smile: