I have a Toshiba Satellite with a dead hdd controller, (long story involving a cat...no really.) Anyway, I thought I'd like to try and make a Media (server) Interface out of it. That is I'd run it from a bootable CD and serve up MP3s from another machine over lan and to my stereo.

So, I've tried many bootable CD versions, Knoppix being the closest to what I want since it has so many drivers, but it has a clunky player and a clumsy way of retrieving files over the lan. It works, but not too easily. It also has a lot of stuff I won't need for my application.

So, since I'm just starting and am just burning iso's at this point, is there one out there that has a really good MP3 player and lan and is bootable from CD with a nice gui?

well i'd suggest that there is more than on player on knoppix. xmms would be the most common, maybe you're using noatun or something like that?

you might also want to try morphix, which is very similar, but doesn't use all the compressed stuff so should be a bit quicker too. I don't know if it actually has a framework for doing this but it does say on the demo i got that you can add and remove parts of it to customize it and create your own tailored version.