I'm looking for a lightweight distro I can install on a, relatively, old box to run a MP3 jukebox. The plan is for mpeg321 to kick off as soon as the machine boots playing random songs, but to be able to ssh to it to kill mpeg321 and then swap to mp3blaster to give a degree of flex, i.e. to play a specific album. The problem is I'm not very good at this, and was wondering if any one has any thoughts on what to use, preferably something with apt to save faffing around with sources. I thought about Linux from scratch but its a bit like using an elephant gun to shoot a mouse. I also looked at dsl but I don't need X. Not entirely sure i could get slack to work tried debian but it seemed to be rather large even with a minimum install. I want something I can, preferably, network boot so really quite small would be best.
cheer folks

what hardware are you trying to run this on?

its a toss up between a p1 90 or a celeron 400. Depends wether (a) the p1 works and (b) if i can find something beter to do with the spare celeron i've inherited.

i tried several different distro's and even several types of BSD on my old laptop. It was a p133 w/ 16mb ram. the best linux I had working was Debian Woody 2.2-compact. I tried to upgrade the kernel to 2.4 and 2.6, but it just wouldn't go with only 16mb ram. If you have at least 32mb ram, you should be good to go with a 2.4 kernel.

I'm currently playing with debian, managed to get it down to 240mb but i stil feel its too bulky. Couple that with the fact that i still haven't got the sound to work, this could be long night. Any one know of the top of there head how small debian can be made to go before its just not a useable system?

[Edit]Sounds working... Rock on ;-)

I've recently had great success doing exactly this with an older box (400mhz celeron) and ubuntu Breezy server-install. No graphical env is installed so it seems to run OK on this older hardware. The sound card was recognized during installation and *just worked*. (I've had much difficulty with other distros' support of older sound hardware.) I'm using MPD+mpeg321 for playback control. I'm pulling music from the local disk as well as from shares on the LAN.

I've even got enough horsepower left over to run some PHP scripts (via apache+php) to control the setup through a web browser.

I was considering writing up some notes on how to do this (what worked / didn't work). If anyone's interested, let me know...

-Brian

Try LIMP. works here.

Linux Multimedia Player is a tiny Linux-based Live distribution that converts your computer into a multimedia player. It supports most of the known formats (MPEG 1 and 2, DivX, WMV, qt-mov, Real, MP3, WAV, WMA, and Ogg, VCD and DVD). It has auto-detection of harddisk (IDE, SATA, or SCSI) and sound, video, and network cards, USB storage device and supports all cards as of kernel 2.6.15. It identifies the filesystems and mounts them in the folder “START”. Network support can be configured through a friendly GUI. Windows Shares, Linux SMB shares can also be mounted and accessed inside the folder “START”. It has menu-driven options and requires no knowledge of Linux, all in an embedded image file of size 26 MB. It can be easily integrated into Windows XP/2000/98/95, a Linux boot loader, or bootable CD-ROM.


This distro, uses the powerful MPLAYER, and user friendly XMMS ( a clone of WINAMP), to give a better interface to play all VIDEO, AUDIO formats plus VCD and DVD.
The entire program is loaded in memory and runs only from the memory. When this distro is booted from CDROM, after loading the program in memory, it automatically ejects the CD.

I heard dyne:bolic is good for running a media server on old hardware. Have never tried it though.