Linux as music-system (newbie)
 

Hello

Can Linux be used as an operating system for a music-box? I'd like to rebuild my old pc into a music-box. I want to achieve a fast booting box that recognizes a cd-player and plays the music-files on the cd. I think this can be done with MPlayer. Later on, I want to add a graphic layer to my box.

What are your thoughts on this idea?

How powerful should my pc/box be?
Is a reasonable boottime possible? (i don't want to wait minutes to listen to a song when the box is turned off...)
Do I need a complete Linux-installation or are the specific Linux versions available for these purposes?

You can try movix. It is a lightweight OS (approx 50 MB) with only a shell with a basic set of commands and mplayer as the audio/video player. It boots pretty fast (around 20 secs on my AMD Athlon XP 1700 Mhz with 256 MB RAM). It supports almost all the formats. Only drawback is the lack of a graphical frontend. It is based on ncurses

Hello!

Any linux-distro should be able to do that for you. You would need to choose one where you can install only what you really need (for instance gentoo) instead of installing alot that you will never need. I don't know if there are any specific distros for this purpose, but you can build one yourself anyway.

If you don't start any (unnecessary) daemons at boot it will be up and running in no time at all. X takes some time to start, but there are CLI-players for music as well. Any PC with a sound card should be fine as long as you don't want to use X.

Good luck!

Razze

I'm using jinzora on one of my home machines to stream mp3's throughout my whole network. You should check it out. Its very cool.

Try DOS?!!
 

Hi,

I was thinking about this a while ago - I was considering building a MAME (arcade emulator) cabinet which would also function as a jukebox.

Good old DOS was my choice, for a few reasons: Fast boot time, and most importantly, it could just be switched off at the wall with no shutdown problems.

I'm sure Linux can do the same thing but I'm not aware of any Linux systems you can just pull the plug on without logging off and shutting down properly?

Francis

Tx for the tips!