Need help deciding which Linux to use for my application. Here is some of the things that I need to be able to do:


1. Connect to W9x & W2K shares.
2. X-Windows interface - have played with IceWM a little bit, looks ok.
3. Descent MP3 player with playlist capabilities.
4. Color LCD touchscreen support
5. Linux - small footprint and boot fast < 30 secs??

Want to build an MP3 player for my audio rack and I believe that Linux is the best way to go. Sounds like a fairly straight forward project to get my feet wet using Linux. Have played with a Linux distro the past 2 weeks and it is running on a Pentium 120 with 64MB RAM. It has proven to be faster and more reliable than the W98 running on the same PC.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Rick

I think about all of them should be able to do what you want. Linux is very customizable. If you want to build your very own distro with the stripped down add what you want features, you could even do a LFS, www.linuxfromscratch.com
But if you want a non bloated distro with a bunch of programs you won't ever use, I would suggest either Slackware or maybe Debian... but they are the more advanced distro's for people familiar with Linux, but is good to learn quickly about Linux with a distro that doesn't do everything for you.

-trickykid

Yes all of them will do the things you explained above. But if you just want a easy distro to install and setup (much like windows) try Mandrake. And then once you feel comfortable with linux you can upgrade to a more advanced distro like Gentoo, Lesbian (EDIT: Debian). I wouldn't count on slackware though becuase support is dieing as we speak, or so i've heard.

what do you mean no support.. take a stab at the top posters of this site.. the majority of them use or have used slackware...

-trickykid

I currently have installed VectorLinux 2.0, it comes with basic Linux OS and tools, plus XWindows interface and development tools. The minor problem I have found with it is that I cannot connect to my W2k shares, NTFS. Therefore I can't play my MP3's yet. Probably will throw in another HD and format VFat32 and move MP3's to there.

Any comments on VectorLinux?

Also where can I find information on compiling software, filenaming conventions, ie filename.so.1, not sure what the difference between names ending in .so or .so.1

You can add NTFS ability to your kernel, but it is really unsafe to use it for more than read-only. Heard good and bad things about Vector as with all other distros I say if you like it, can manage it, and it does what you want, it is the "best".