Distribution recommended for minimal OS installation

[PeterTaps]

Folks,

I am working on a set-top media box. When booted, the box will simply bring up a media player. No other applications would run.

At present, we use VLC for the media player.

I am a bit biased towards debian-based distributions as the repositories tend to have everything I need. Plus, I am used to "apt-get" style install.

After a little bit of research, I settled on the following:

Minimal Ubuntu + OpenBox.

OpenBox is lightweight window manager and seems it can play VLC.

I am wondering if there is a better alternative. Although disk space is not that important, performance is.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Regards,
Peter

[atreyu]

if, as you say, performance is important, you may want to consider a source-based distro, like Gentoo. They take a little more elbow grease to install, but are worth it b/c they are built specifically for your hardware, with only the features you want. Along those lines, maybe Gentoox, a Gentoo-based XBMC port, would be of interest to you.

[jayd512]

Instead of OpenBox, you could go truly minimal...
TWM.

[electroman6913]

I have my media server running Arch. it's minimal and you can put any desktop environment you wan't on it.

[Dapper Dan]

A very minimal Debian install with IceWM, TWM or one of the boxes. Better yet, if running just sound files, have no "GUI" at all and run all from a command line music player like mp3blaster, mplayer or cmus. With video you would of course need xwindows.

Echoes: 13 Command Line Tools for Audio on Linux