Light a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

A while back my father-in-law, being the generous guy he is, handed me 2 laptops. They were both in working condition, with all the plugs and cables needed for usage. What is the catch you ask yourself…. nothing… if your a nerd and don’t plan on using them as your regular pc, you see these lappies barley run Windoz ‘98. 64 meg of ram doesn’t really get you to far in the computer world today.

These lappies sat in the back room of my house when one day I was reading one of my favorite blogs TUAW (BTW this isn’t the post I saw but you get the idea.) Well, being the master of self-control that I am I got off work at 11:00 pm and went straight home and started on my new project.

***Note to self- install the operating system and pictures before dismantling the lappie.

The keyboard was a pain in the butt to get off. I eventually decided that I didn’t care if it came off in one piece- and then it did. After removing the hard-drive and the screws in the back of the casing I was able to remove the inside cover (where the keyboard once was) and start the real work.

I removed everything. Everything.

Then I took what I wanted out of the pile and starting putting back together what I needed for the Photophrame: the motherboard (processor was still intact with fan), the hard-drive, the screen, the disk drive, and the keyboard. (You only need the keyboard and disk drive for set-up on most lappies, then you can toss them.)

With dismantling done I needed a light snack at 1:00 am. My hot wife hooked me up.

Man I look bad, ummm.. I mean hot.

I pieced it all back together on the table and did a test run of the boot up. ***Note to self- hard drive cannot be touching the motherboard or lappy shorts out.

Now to make the casing. I wanted to do something nifty that I saw on the original post, which was to mount the whole thing on two pieces of Plexiglas. I put the motherboard and the screen on the pieces that I had purchased at Lowe’s (they also cut it for free if you buy it there) and marker-ed in the mounting holes. I had to borrow a drill from my parents house and I drilled the holes in my living room.

*** Note to self- put something under the Plexiglas or you drill into the carpet.

I mounted the screen and motherboard onto the Plexiglas with some nuts and bolts that I purchased at Lowe’s as well. Total cost at Lowe’s: give or take $20.

I decided to go with a different distribution of Linux than Knoppix. Kubuntu gave me a workable desktop and a GUI that I was more familiar with. I used Synaptic Package Manager to grab FEH (a light weight image viewer). FEH is great, if you aren’t a big linux user just type “man feh” in the command line and it gives you all the instructions you need. My buddie Justin helped me write a script to run FEH at startup, and Vua-La “et voila” your own homemade photophrame for cheaper than dirt.

It’s sooo hot, I want to touch the hiny.

Its really power efficient, and with Kubuntu you can configure the screen not to go dark when not being used and have scheduled shutdowns. Now I only really turn it on at our weekly Cookie Night to impress the other nerds that show up to my house.

**Update: Thanks to Tess I now know that proper French is “et voila” as reflected in the post. I have the script that Justin helped me make as well if anyone is interested I will post it.