I suppose I'm thinking a bit 'in between'.

I was looking for a more 'off the shelf' or guided approach to make it accessible to more people. I know *I* could just (probably!) hack one together but I was hoping that it may be feasible to look for easily obtained components and design something that was accessible to more people - there aren't *that* many people out there that would attempt, from cold, to rip a laptop apart to do this - but I suspect that there are a lot who would follow a guide... especially one with a shopping list. Although there's always the problem then becomes keeping it up-to-date as hardware changes.

I was also looking at bigger screens - I want a 19" one - and they cost in at £135. So some details on VESA mounting, some suggestions as to frame design, which model screens have the best construction for this kind of approach; which have good standby power etc etc. Hints to mount an old laptop behind a screen - how to silence a laptop; using CF drives instead of hdd drives; even network boot instructions?

I don't have the expertise to even consider progressing peter's suggestion - however if others did take it forward then having 1 pico-iTX (or laptop or similar) display and several slave wifi-framebuffers would be interesting...

And I'm not wedded to pico-iTX - it's not cheap!
It may even be better to look for a very low-end laptop to sacrifice.
I really don't know
Hell, I'm lucky that SWMBO can bring home the odd old laptop destined for the skip - but suggestions gratefully received...

I would *love* a thin client that controlled a simple 3D GPU chipset - especially if I could rig it inside a 19" monitor case and use the monitor PSU etc...

I agree about the software - but it's not *that* hard. I'm thinking of a debian/ubuntu based (simply because I know it ) mini distro.
Use as many OTS components as possible and look at the hardware requirements to determine selection/behaviour

So the package selection is driven by: Do you have:
* 3D graphics
* sound
* wifi
* any peter-frame clients
*...

There's a little utility called gliv which looks like an interesting base - it does slideshows, has a 'server' concept and works with and without GL. (I've always wanted to do openGL code...)

I've already got my laptop running with a minimal install and displaying pictures - I just need to package it now