Turn an iMac G4 into a mysterious far seeing device.
The first glorious ball and stick iMacs can no longer run current Mac software, you can force it, but it is painful and has a video defect coming back from sleep. So, what do to with them…
They are too pretty to throw out, so turn them into picture frames.
- Install Debian Lenny. (burn CD, boot with ‘C’, do the normal stuff)
- Try to find a package to just fill the flipping console with a jpeg. Fail.
- Write a little program using the fbdev and libjpeg.
- Agonize of over “doing the right thing” with image scaling.
- Discover freeimage. Pitch previous code, let library do the right thing.
- Fail miserably on the iMac. Clearly I am missing something, but I can’t get the console into true color mode. I can make it be 32 bits per pixel in the frame buffer, but it still does some sort of pseudocolor.
It’s quick! It’s not dirty!
It is HUGE! freeimage is a 6M install for my 18K program. That’s ok on this recycled machine with 512M Ram and 40G disk, but I’ll need to code my own Lanczos resampler if I want to use this on small machines.