smallest, fastest, minimalist-est distro?

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10-03-2009
withnail

smallest, fastest, minimalist-est distro?

Hi there, I want to make a music player based on Linux. Playing audio is all it'll ever do, tho obviously i will want a screen. As a result I'm looking for a distro that boots extremely fast, can use touch, and has decent ALSA compatibility. Disk space, system specs etc will be fairly good, all that's necessary is that it boots like lightning and can do everything i need it to with audio. Touchscreen is a bonus. Any ideas?
10-03-2009
rokytnji

You will have to install a music player and touchscreen yourself but you could start out with

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...tion/MinimalCD
10-03-2009
oz

Welcome to the forums! :)

You can find some mini linux distros here:

Mini Linux - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I've never chosen a distro just for audio, so can't really recommend any certain distribution. Let us know what you go with and how it works out for you.
10-03-2009
engless

For audio

For multimedia you could have a look at DYNE:BOLIC.
10-06-2009
withnail

Thanks everyone! I'll try Damn Small for now. Let you know how I get on :)
10-07-2009
withnail

Just thought - I'd like to use four drive RAID 10, what's my best option? I'd like to just use software RAID for cost reasons but will that be possible on a minimalist distro? and what's low-cost RAID-card support like on these distros?
Cheers
05-02-2010
elephantrange

If you're using Damn Small Linux, I'd recommend the 3.3 distro instead of 4.1. I mess around with audio stuff quite a bit, and the 4.1 version is bundled without MC (Midnight Commander) - an EXTREMELY valuable file manager. 4.1 is also a bit laggy on older machines, from my experience. (I use Audacity quite a bit, and get a bit of stuttering on an old 486dx2 - not much of a complaint, I know...) Anyway, once I was accustomed to DSL, I downgraded (!!!) to an ancient tiny distro - Basic Linux 3.5, placed it on a seperate partition, and then tailored it to the audio apps I wanted on there - from my DSL partition. That was a lot of fun and frustration, especially with the lib dependencies, but I have Audacity running in it lightning-fast. I'm using this as a template for a new distro.
05-02-2010
elephantrange

Quote:

Originally Posted by withnail

Hi there, I want to make a music player based on Linux. Playing audio is all it'll ever do, tho obviously i will want a screen. As a result I'm looking for a distro that boots extremely fast, can use touch, and has decent ALSA compatibility. Disk space, system specs etc will be fairly good, all that's necessary is that it boots like lightning and can do everything i need it to with audio. Touchscreen is a bonus. Any ideas?

I'll add a bit to what I just wrote. At the Basic Linux homepage - which I cannot post the URL to here because I have not posted enough comments yet! - click on the Add-on's link. Note the mpg123.tgz file. This is probably the smallest music player configuration you will find.

Hope that helps!