Hello,
I have used a couple different linux distros, just to mess around with. (but im still fairly new) I got an idea for a media computer, its specs arent gunna be very good. 533 mhz, 128 megs of ram, idk about graphics card yet, and the hard drive at th most is gunna be 20 or 40 gigs. (id like it to be touch screen compatable too) Its just gunna be used for playing music and some movies, but not movies too much. Anyone out there got any ideas for a distro that would fit my needs?

Well I can say that Gentoo will work great, but it will take you forever to install. I would almost say forget Gentoo. I love it, but on a machine with such low specs the compiling would take months.

Any distro will fit your needs. Its the software that you add on to your distro that will make the difference. Due to licensing restrictions very few, if any, distributions come with the suppor to play most audio/video files (like mp3, wmv, wma, avi), so with any distro you choose you will have to add this support. As far as software is concerned, though, I would recommend Mplayer. It has some good documentation and it pretty easy to setup and use.

Since you don't have must horsepower in your machine, I would recomment using a distro with less frills, like Xubuntu (a Ubuntu version that uses the XFCE window manager). I've written a pretty in-depth review of Xubuntu here at LQ: Click Here.

Good luck with the touch screen compaibility thing. You're gonna need it.

~Justin

Nahhhh... Not that long. Not quite anyway. I used to build Gentoo on a 300MHz PII with 128MB ram, she was a beast.

I would also suggest XMMS for the music. Very nice music player with very many features. It's basically a clone of WinAmp (for Windows), and uses the same themes, etc, but has more features and way more cool plugins. Plays almost any music type you can think of.

Also, as for the touch screen thing... the way your post is written suggests that you don't have the touchscreen hardware yet. I have seen some modules for touchscreens in the kernel configure (but have not ever played with them as I do not have a touchscreen), but I would suggest looking at the kernel config and finding out what touchscreen models specifically those modules support so that you can buy the hardware knowing that it will be compatable. I don't know much about touchscreens... but one thing I know is that not alot of people have them, so I imagine they would be rather sparsely supported, and you would want to make sure to get a model that you could make work, unless you want to go through hell trying to make it work (including potentially writing your own driver or *shiver* going back to Windows to use it.)