I am not exactly a Linux newbie, I've been using it for 2 years. But I've never gotten quite this deep before.

I made a LFS (linux from scratch) server with an old computer (blaster pc from tigerdirect, incidentally) and I want to use it to play my music collection over the network.

Here's where it gets interesting. I don't want to have a monitor, but i definately need some way to see what song is playing. I don't want a keyboard and mouse, but I would like to be able to control it from the box. So i thought, let me buy an LCD screen and some buttons and hack together my own little interface for the front.

My idea is to use the parallel port (actually a usb->parallel) connecting the LCD screen using just the output lines and the buttons for the input lines. I figured out that you can have 6 buttons, if i remember correctly, with the left over input wires.

of course, the problem is that i have no drivers to interface it to the os. i got the linux device drivers v3 book and have begun to read it, but i thought i would ask advice from anyone who wants to give it.

jungle

Instead of writing drivers for some hand-made hardware, you could use MPD (Music Player Daemon), which is a music player with a client-server architecture and can be controlled from a remote computer. You can then use a frontend on another linux box, that will display information about the current song and much more.