audio playback-only distro

[linkxs]

Hi,
I have lots of old laptops, and I was wondering if there was a linux distro out there specifically for audio playback? the laptop i was going to use for this is a 300mhz toshiba portege 3110ct.

Pretty much what i want is a big ipod with a keyboard and a 40gb hard drive. and linux. and some audio player (i love winamp, i was thinking xmms). the reason i don;t want to use windows is because win2k is lagging like crazy already.

Thanks in advance!

[coopstah13]

I would try damn small linux, it has a very small footprint that is geared towards old machines. This would hopefully fit your needs.

[reed9]

There are some distros geared to be media boxes, but I think they might be more bloated than you're looking for. But any lightweight distro would probably be adequate for your needs.

I did something similar with an old laptop. I put pretty much just a base Arch Linux install, no X windows taking up space, with MPD on it. Hooked up a couple of speakers and it's pretty much just a wireless stereo that I can control from any computer on the network.

[linkxs]

well, the laptop i'm targeting is a *****: it's an ultraportable, so it has an external cd-rom drive through pcmcia. So far, i've only gotten a few distros to work through that. I believe, I never succeded with DSL.

Also another problem is that most light distros have little or no support for wifi chipsets, most of mine are lame, but recently i got a motorola pcmcia card, hopefully it's more compatible. not sure what schipset it has though.

[reed9]

Does that laptop support booting from a USB flash drive? That would probably be the easiest method.

Outside of the ultralight distros like Slitaz, DSL, or Tiny Core, most lightweight distros have pretty decent hardware support in my experience. Depending on the wireless card, you may need to download extra firmware in almost any distro. If you have access to a wired connection, it's pretty easy to get what you need for your wireless in most cases.

If you have even passing familiarity with the command line, I do recommend Arch for a project like this. It's easy to customize it to suit your needs, and they are very pro-choice, even if that choice is using proprietary solutions, so they make it easy to install non-free firmware or drivers as needed. Though it only runs on i686 or x86_64 processors, so depending on the age of your hardware it might not be an option.

[linkxs]

on the second thought, it does have a docking station thing with an eth port, so i could jsut use that, but wifi would be nicer, less wired to stumble upon, less probability of anihilating the laptop itself. i'm not exactly sure, but isn't i686 same as the i386? my toshiba is a i386 architecture.

[reed9]

i386 are the really really old x86 processors introduced in 1985.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386

i686 is pretty much anything Pentium II and better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_P...roarchitecture)

[linkxs]

ah. yeah, that's pretty much what i thought. thanks

[rokytnji]

I have had good luck Womp and Puppy 2.14,2.18,and older Puppies on P1 i386,64mb ram laptops. Worth a shot maybe.

[computerophil]

Hi,
I have lots of old laptops, and I was wondering if there was a linux distro out there specifically for audio playback? the laptop i was going to use for this is a 300mhz toshiba portege 3110ct.

Pretty much what i want is a big ipod with a keyboard and a 40gb hard drive. and linux. and some audio player (i love winamp, i was thinking xmms). the reason i don;t want to use windows is because win2k is lagging like crazy already.

Thanks in advance!

Hallo,
I honestly don't know if such a thing exists but linuxworld is big.
Better you tell us about the RAM.

Puppy Linux is very small. It can do much more than audio playback.
Maybe it would be worth for you to try it out.
The difficulty is only to find the right version if those laptops are really that old.

Ciao