Hi, I have recently inherited a real old pc (233 mhz hahaha) and want to use it for one thing, to play music in my front room, I want it to play audio cd's and mp3's so I need a distro that doesn't give the processor much to do other than play the stuff, win 98 has proved jerky on playback of mp3's I'm assuming the will be a decent distro for something like this, has anyone had any good experiences in similar activities? Does anyone know of a distro that specialises in this sort of thing?

A gui would be preferable, but if it needs to be done away with to gain the proccessing speed required I guess I can do without it, so any advice anyone?

how interesting that you posted this, I am currently in the same dilemma (toshiba laptop, 233mhz, 32mb ram =D )

i've been messing around with it for the past few days, trying to get it going at a decent speed.

i've tried:

debian sarge: linux kernel 2.6.8. I did this because I was using it as an X-terminal, and i needed 2.6 for wireless. Don't even try it if you want to run X with any sort of client.

debian sarge, linux kernel 2.4.26. This works a bit better, and the machine is fairly functional (albeit very slow). My wifi card is supported under this kernel as well.

come to think of it, i had debian woody installed on it a long time ago. I was using the 2.2 kernel along with gnome 1.4 :-P. It was nice, mostly because of apt-get. And it ran well. I really only used it for playing music and surfing the internet. I tried various music players, xmms and a couple of mpg123/ogg123 frontends. They all worked quite well, as I recall. Decoding and playing used up about 30% CPU. And really, 2.2 was well usable as a normal laptop.

My advice is debian woody, since it's still easy to get ahold of and works fairly well, plus you have the advantage of apt-get. Although any other distro would work fine. However, I would still strongly reccomend using kernel 2.2.

/**EDIT**

Oh, and I just thought of something. I don't know how important a gui is to you, but if you're OK with using the command line, there's a great console/ ncurses media player called mp3blaster which i found to be very easy to use. Ditching X would definitely help with the resources problem . And besides, if you're just playing music, it's so much easier to hit a button on the keyboard than to click a button on-screen with a mouse.


another thing you might look into is a live distro called geexbox. The CD image is about 7MB, and is loaded into memory when you boot up. It has a dvdplayer-like interface, which i don't really like for playing music, but it might be something to check out, nevertheless. Being a live distro, this would be the easiest one to set up.

**EDIT**/

hope this will help,

-brandon

Thanks Brandon, I'm downloading geexbox to give it a whirl, as my bandwidth is narrow so I'll see how it goes in an hour or so looks like there could be some fiddly issues involved, but I'll give it a bash