Digital Signage Software Linux Open Source
If you've spent any time shopping for digital signs for your small business, you might be a tad discouraged at the cost and complexity. But thanks to, you can enjoy a whole new generation of software, services, and devices that range from free to inexpensive, and that offer all kinds of great features. Amazingly flexible, digital signs can display simple images, slideshows, movies, Web pages, and dynamic content pulled in from the Internet, or whatever sources you want to use. Anything you can do on a computer you can put into digital signage. Android, the popular Linux variant, is slimmed-down for portable devices such as smartphones, tablets, gaming and media boxes, and desktops and laptops. It also makes a dandy lightweight, power-frugal platform for digital signs. You can stuff an entire Android operating system, plus your multimedia presentations, into a matchbox-sized case and run a big screen with it.
Linux is a mature general-purpose enterprise operating system hardened by two decades of development and use in the most demanding environments, from embedded devices, desktops, laptops, and small servers to mainframes and supercomputers. It's stable, secure, and adaptable. So which one is better? If you're looking for a digital sign system with software, hardware, and support, you'll find a lot of Android options. If you're more inclined to do-it-yourself, or have good tech people, then Linux offers a wider choice of software, and you can run it on pretty much any hardware. Digital signage is just a fancy term for your stuff on a screen—like schedules, commercials, product information, menus, catalogs, order forms, or anything you want.
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You can use just about any kind of display: televisions, ordinary computers and monitors, small form-factor hardware like the, digital photo screens, heavy-duty commercial-grade computer monitors, big outdoor screens, and big free-standing touch-screen kiosks. Check out and to see what's available in the world of video screens. If you can connect a computer to it, you can make it display whatever you want. The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little single-board computer originally designed as an educational tool for children, but it's also a big hit with adults for its low price—starting around $30—and adaptability. Offers several worthy digital sign applications that run on the Raspberry Pi, including the super-easy Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow.
This product displays your images in a full-screen slideshow, and Web pages from a simple text list of URLs. All you do is download and install the Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow operating system to a USB stick, copy your images or URLs to the same USB stick, plug it into the Raspberry Pi and boot up. It runs in protected full-screen mode so nobody can mess with it. Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow is free to download and use. If you like it, drop a few bucks in the company's PayPal account. Donations get you access to software with enhanced features. —a slick, sophisticated Web application—runs on your Linux, Mac, or Windows server.
It's a free download with no limitations—you get full functionality whether or not you feed the tip jar. Running Xibo requires a bit more tech savvy. For an average tech nerd it's easy to install and setup. Xibo, like most Web apps, has three components: the server, the administration interface, and the display clients. Currently the display client software runs on Windows, Ubuntu Linux, and Android.
The Windows and Linux clients are free, while the Android client costs about $25 per client. Not so tech-savvy? Xibo also offers a fast, reasonably-priced cloud platform—Xibo in the Cloud—which saves you the hassle of installing and managing software. Once Xibo's installed, you have the full power of your operating system and applications for designing and running your digital signs. You can make simple slideshows in your favorite slideshow app, run videos, use a content management system like Drupal or Wordpress for rich dynamic content—the sky's the limit. Xibo comes with a batch of content-management tools such as schedulers, templates and layouts, tickers, transitions, and a user-management system for dividing up the work in a secure fashion.