Need Advice for low spec MP3 jukebox system

maxheadroom

Hi everyone,

There's a really old machine in one of our skills labs in college which is basically used as an mp3 jukebox. Specs are:

Pentium1 200 MHZ
32 MB RAM
Basic graphics, soundblaster etc

It it currently running win95 and uses winamp to play mp3s.

All the machine needs to do is:
Boot to some kind of gui
Start a music player application
Have a file manager available so people can copy over their mp3s to the machine from data CDs
(optionally) have some interface for people to rip cds

I want to donate an old 40GB drive I have lying around at home as the machine's limited hard disc space is already full. Obviously, Win95 won't look at partitions bigger than 2GB and the thought of having to split the drive into 19 different partitions makes my brain hurt. Modifying / upgrading the current Win95 installation isn't a possibility due to some software that needs to stay on it that I can't risk breaking.

I'm looking at either dual booting win98 (using something like bootmagic) or some form of Linux. I'd like to go with the linux option, but I've never put linux on a system this limited before so I need some advice.

I need a distro reccomendation. I would have used Gentoo, as I'm familiar with it, but GRE packages are compiled for i686, so I can't. Obviously it needs to be easy to install on low spec machines and let me control every piece of software installed (above a small base system) so performance doesn't suffer. I'm thinking something like debian or slackware, or one of their variants?

This thing needs to run X. I need a window manager and taskbar / menubar / button bar type program (I need to have big buttons for: music player, file manager, cd ripper and shutdown). Something like XFCE4 would be great, but I suspect this would be too heavyweight for the system. Maybe (open/flux/black)box with something like fbpanel?
I need a music player - preferably something with a built in media library. Rhythmbox would be nice but I don't know what its memory requirements are like.
For the file manager, I was thinking something like rox-filer might be a good choice, but again, I'm not sure.
For the CD ripper, is there anything out there apart from GRIP? Or, would GRIP be a good choice here? Or, should I just forget about CD ripping on a system this old?

Above all else, I want to configure this so it is easy to use. Turn on the machine, leave it for a minute, and X is loaded and the music player starts automatically. A bar with 4 buttons on it to launch the 3 options or shut down the machine.

I'd really appreciate any input on this,

MH

Blowfish

How about going mad and using one of the BSD's? They will pretty much work on anything, only snag is though they come with X, they use FVWM, which is crap, so u will have 2 install KDE or GNOME yourself.

maxheadroom

Blowfish wrote:

How about going mad and using one of the BSD's? They will pretty much work on anything, only snag is though they come with X, they use FVWM, which is crap, so u will have 2 install KDE or GNOME yourself.

I'd prefer to stick with what I'm familiar with - I don't think this is the time to branch off into BSDland. I'd like to get this up and running quite quickly.

And, with those kind of specs, there's no way I'm letting KDE or GNOME anywhere near this machine I'll install the various libraries if needed for the applications I need, but ideally I don't want to go near anything that memory / processor hungry.

I'll probably need to install gtk, gtk2 etc anyway, so I'll probably try to avoid QT or KDElibs dependencies.

niallb

Damn Small Linux installed to hard disk if you must have X. It has xmms on it and a filemanager along with
plenty of other lightweight apps.

With only 32M of RAM, running X at all leaves you very little headroom for your player. Can you stick even another 32M into it?

NiallB

maxheadroom

niallb wrote:

Damn Small Linux installed to hard disk if you must have X. It has xmms on it and a filemanager along with
plenty of other lightweight apps.

With only 32M of RAM, running X at all leaves you very little headroom for your player. Can you stick even another 32M into it?

NiallB

Isn't DSL just a cut down debian? In that case I'd much prefer to install my own version of debian - I just downloaded all 14 CDs of sarge

There was a 16 MB DIMM in it when I first opened the machine. I had another one lying around the attic which I put into the machine to bump it up to 32MB. I don't intend to spend any money on this, so that's as high as the RAM is going, I'm afraid (and both slots are in use now anyway)

Its currently doing quite well with win95, and the choice is between dual booting win98 or some form of linux. I know win98 will be fine on this system, but surely linux can work here too?

niallb

DSL is kind of a "cut down debian", but it's been cut down very carefully
by people who really know what they're doing, and have made every
effort to get the maximum performance out of it.
It uses a different X server to your sarge CDs which is much smaller.
All of the applications have been rebuilt with lighter libraries,
so they're all much smaller.

You will never match it for performance with a stock debian install.

If you've downloaded 14 CDs of Debian, downloading DSL is just
another 50MB. It's a live CD, burn it to disk and give it a go.

If your machine will boot from CD, just stick it in.
It'll come straight up with a desktop, filemanager and a media player,
so I think it's pretty well matched to what you want.

A machine with 32MB of RAM isn't really going to
It has scripts on the menu to install to disk, which will improve performance.
It'll fit on a 100-200M partition with loads of space for extras, and will read
your music from the windows partition if needed.

Give it a shot!
NiallB

SouperComputer

maybe you could use geexbox as a base?

http://geexbox.org/en/index.html

eggshapedfred

could you run it without the gui and admin it over a network. that would save some ram. maybe write some scripts to automatically rip a cd once its put into the drive (using cdparanoia => no need for Grip).

Rambo

I ran redhat 9 on a simular computer the gui took a age to do somthing
it did play my mp3 but is just slow its was frustrating ..
bring memory up to at least 128m

Duffman

Another vote for DSL. XMMS should work perfectly with those specs. You'll have plug and play support for USB devices so people can add files.

Maybe you could add an extra 32megs for next to nothing and run something likek rythmbox.

MrScruff

A different approach:

Set up apache with php or perl and use it as a headless box.
Have a script to generate a page with all mp3 files from a certain directory,
you could extract the ID3 tags even. Allowing users to visit a web page where
they can play or even que up a song. I have written a simple perl script to do this and use a command line mp3 player called from perl. It works quite well.
You can go as simple or complex as you like( stats on most frequently played etc)

liamo

Another different approach .....

I was given a Roku Soundbridge as a present.
At that time, I had a Soekris in a nice, tidy little case and a spare 40GB laptop drive.

A little research and a little installing later .....

The Soekris now sports a 40GB drive and a flashy new Debian install. I put the music server mt-daapd on it and ripped all our CDs (about 3,500 tracks) and saved them to the Soekris (now called "jukebox").

The Soundbridge (downstairs in the living room) can browse the tracks, play albums, playlists, etc (all wirelessly, of course). The quality is excellent and our CDs are now in a box in the attic.

Regards,

Liam