Yet Another Linux Distro Thread

Post by **bicostp** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 11:13 am

Ok, I have a crappy old P1 166 MMX desktop sitting around, alongwith several loose hard dricves os various sizes and roughly 20 GB of MP3s. So I put them together in my head and thought of making an MP3 jukebox PC. However, I needed an OS for it. Win95? Nah, takes up too much of the system resources for my liking (:lol: just remember, turn back about 10 years...). DOS? Nah I want a GUI of some sort. Linux? Just need a distro, or instructions on how to make my own distro

So can anyone give me a link to a good, minimal Linux system that JUST includes an MP3 player program and a full-screen GUI? Or do you think I should forge into the dark, confusing world of Linux from Scratch?

Ooh! What was that jukebox DOS program someone was going to use to make a car mp3 computer?

Oh and on another note I downloaded and burned SUSE 9.1 Personal (both the live CD and the install CD). It's probably going to replace my hard drive Knoppix install, because it's more common and I can find help on it much easier (I hope).

Thanks everyone

Post by **SpongeBuell** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 11:41 am

http://webpages.charter.net/celamantia/jukebox/ is the program I was going to use, before I realized my tablet was too slow.

If you want a Linux one, why not DamnSmall Linux? Sure, it has more than an MP3 player, but it's not a huge resource hog or anything.

Mr. Cool · Post by **Mr. Cool** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 11:53 am

DashPC is the car pc thing, but thats more for touchscreens, and not rally for what you want. Its too much geared towards car pcs, not enough towards an mp3 jukebox.

daleighan · Post by **daleighan** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 12:14 pm

I vote DSL

Post by **gannon** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 12:32 pm

Now this is neat

http://www.giantdisc.org/ <- palm based remote for linux jukebox
All you need is a distro to instal it on

Post by **marshallh** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 2:40 pm

No bic

You need to run MPXPLAY. It's absolutely awesome! I use it for my Car MP3 player. You need DOS 6.22+ and a Sound Blaster-compatible sound card (been a while since that term has been used

http://www.geocities.com/mpxplay/

Get DOSLFN and put it into your CONFIG.SYS and autoexec bat, and you're set. You can remap the key controls to any key scancode, which worked well for me. It supports HD44780 lcds, too.

here's my Car MP3 player head unit:

loup · Post by **loup** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 2:56 pm

I vote for DSL (http://damnsmalllinux.org), it does have a lot more than just an mp3 player on it, but it is pretty minimalistic, it onlt takes up about 50MB and is a live CD distro, stick it in your cdrom and you're good to go. And it's not too hard to customize, if you want to do a HD install you can, and then it's pretty easy to turn on apt and then add and remove packages whenever you want.

Post by **bicostp** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 3:33 pm

Yeah I've used DSL before. I've used it a lot, actually. The problem is, I load the machine with my DSL disc, it brings up the boot option screen, and after I hit enter it just sits there at "booting the kernel..." What could the problem be? The machine has about 40 MB RAM in it now, and I've got some 32 MB SIMMS lying around I could probably add if necessary...

(the disc is fine, I boot the school's PCs all the time with it)

Post by **bicostp** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 6:41 pm

Oh no! Double post!

Ok I got it to boot DSL, and it works great! (I had it copy the CD image to the existing HD partition to boot faster, and so I can use the CD-ROM drive)

However, the audio levels are very very quiet. I have turned up every volume control I can find to maximum, but nothing is helping.

What could be the problem this time? It's running a standard SoundBlaster 16 compatible.

(The first song I play on it? "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones. *does the Carlton dance*

)

EDIT: Turns out the problem is the disc drive. I swapped it out for another one.)

Harshboy · Post by **Harshboy** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 6:43 pm

i too have this problem....i have XDSL...the DSL release for Xbox, and i too hear no sound when the release data says "UPDATE: Sound support..works on everything!" So how can i fix this little problem?

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 8:58 pm

Yeah I've experianced the problem where DSL was booting but just hanges. I dont know what the problem is (my laptop had 16MB ram). If you dont mind running only command line or adding a GUI latter try either Slackware or a Slack-based distro.

loup · Post by **loup** » Sat Dec 03, 2005 10:57 pm

sparkfist, that's a pretty low amount of ram, even for dsl, you might want to stick in a bit more (I think the lowest I ever tried running it was 64mb) or else at the very least having a hard drive with a linux swap partition on it to give you just a little more playing room.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sun Dec 04, 2005 7:26 am

Hey they've reported having DSL run on less, like a 486 with 16MB ram. And as for upgrading ram.... I would if I could find a way to add more. The laptop is a.... I cant put this nicely so I would discrpibe trying to open it, its hard.

loup · Post by **loup** » Sun Dec 04, 2005 11:47 am

did you try it with the lowram boot code?

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sun Dec 04, 2005 12:56 pm

I tryied to get it working with help from my Linux instructor and he didnt know what to do. Frankly if linux cant boot, it cant be used period. And DSL boots like all the old school versions where you see the serivices and devices checked, no GUI.

Like I said before if you cant get DSL to run on the machine then you'll have to go with a distro that doesnt have a GUI, something like a lite install of Slackware or Debian or based on it. I know that an OS like FreeBSD only needs 4MB ram if your doing minimal install, thats no GUI and really no services but a shell.