I had an old Aptiva lying around, so I installed Slackware on it and I have been using it to play my music with the monitor off. Since this is all I use it for, I thought it would be fun to go the extra step and convert it into a full time jukebox. I need to know a few things about this:

-How can I change the keyboard shortcuts for XMMS?
-Can I play music with XMMS without X running, and how would I start it automatically?
-Is it safe to saw a keyboard into a small piece that only has the 5 buttons or so that I need? to have Play, Stop, Forward, Back, Vol Up, and Vol Down.

Any other suggestions would be helpful

Thanks,
-LBB

I wouldn't want to cut a keyboard up

I would recommend installing something like Globecom Jukebox which is what I use. And I love it. Web based admin from my desktop blasts mp3s throughout the house

Unless you want to use XMMS for a particular reason, you could use mp3blaster as your mp3 player instead. It's ncurses-based so X doesn't need to be running.

http://www.stack.nl/~brama/mp3blaster.html

screenshot:
http://www.stack.nl/~brama/mp3blaste...e1_playing.gif

See this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=170314

Unless you cut yourself But no, I doubt the keyboard will work if you cut it apart. I can't really say because I've never tried it myself.

If you have some extra $ you could buy a small 20 key or so ps2 keypad. Then relabel the keys to your whims. It wouldn't take much to write a script.

What would really be nice is a small LCD touch screen.
http://www.avdeals.com/xenarc/700ts.htm

Other solutions require a little more effort like building a keypad that attaches to the parallel or serial ports. You could also use small LCD character displays that interface to a serial port. They come in various line and character lengths.

wow, I am amazed at all the fast responses.

I'm really liking that mp3blaster program, I'm going to give that a try and see if it sounds as good as XMMS.

What I was thinking I'd do with the keyboard was just map the 'Fwd, Back, Play, Pause, etc.' buttons to Z X C V B N and M on the bottom row. Then I could get out the trusty old hacksaw and remove the rest of the keys. sand off the edges, and repaint it. I would think that those characters would still get sent, just the others wouldnt work.

That LCD is just beautiful, but I think I might be in some trouble if I went out and spent $500 on our music system

The mini-keyboards are also a good idea. I will try that if making my own dosnet work.

Thanks for all of your help,
LBB

How a keyboard works:
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/scancodes-10.html
http://www.burtonsys.com/PS2_keyboar...r_pinouts.html
http://panda.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/~acha...ro/PS2/ps2.htm

You would need to disasemble the keyboard taking note of the controller and circuit board layout. Like I said Iv'e never taken a keyboard apart but a closer examination might lead to the possibility of cutting the board down. There is a also chance damaging the keyboard controller inside the PC with your modified keyboard.

mp3blaster works great, and I especially like it because I dont have to load up KDE and X when I dont need it. I took apart one of my old keyboards and looked at those links that michealk posted. I dont think cutting up the keyboard is going to work. On my board the processor is right in the center of the back, so I would have to find some way to move it, and that would not be easy. Instead, I am going to try to get one of those detachable keypads that come with some laptops. That should work well enough.

Thanks for all the help