[soylentcola]

That's nuts. I had to replace some old Cisco media players that we used as digital schedule boards outside of ~20 classrooms. The Cisco players were quite old and only needed to load a webpage that pulled schedule info from elsewhere and displayed it in the proper format.

I decided to do this with RPi and went through several revisions as I learned/relearned a lot about Linux. The first version was built on full Raspbian and added a basic server listening on some port or another so I could remotely reboot the things by clicking links on a simple website I put together. That build would usually crap out after a few months and the Pis would stop booting fully from the Sandisk MicroSD cards.

Most recent rev was built from the "Lite" version of Raspbian as I was looking to stay slim and have less stuff to update/run in the background/cause issues with the basic operation of a device that only needed to boot, load Chromium, and open a webpage defined in the startup script.

Those have been a lot more stable (no more reimaging a card here and there every month or two) but they still occasionally crap out and a reimage is the only option (maybe once every 6-8 months). This is in an air conditioned building with stable power, wired LAN connection, and fast SD cards. I can't imagine they would be even this reliable running all the time in any sort of "hostile" environment or even using wireless networking.

I looked into network boot but didn't really have the time or resources to set it all up on the school's network.