desktop solely for music

mdelude · 12-31-2007, 02:22 PM

Hello all,

I built a machine that I plan on using for music only, but I'm having trouble finding a suitable distro.

It's designed to be quiet, so I'm booting off a compact flash card and using other flash cards for songs. The CF card is plugged into IDE via a CF-to-IDE adapter, so it looks just like a standard hard drive, and the other cards are going to be plugged into an internal USB card reader.

My problem is that every distro I've tried has either not readily supported the card reader I'm using, or has been too large to fit the CF card I want to use.

In all, I would like a distro that has a GUI, can play mp3's, recognizes the card reader, and can install on a 128MB CF card if possible (no LiveCD-type methods). If that's too much to ask, then I'll just take the easy road, which is forget the 128MB card and get a larger one.

Thanks

Tinkster · 12-31-2007, 04:41 PM

Hi, and welcome to LQ!

Honestly? If you don't want to do an HDD-install of e.g.
DSL I'd suggest going with the bigger CF card. 128 MB is
quite limited for even slim installs of all major distros.

Cheers,
Tink

mohtasham1983 · 12-31-2007, 10:15 PM

I would recommend Ubuntu since it uses the latest kernel and it has the biggest community. It would be better if you mention the name of distributions that you already tried.

I also wanted to suggest amarok as the best music player. Myself found out about it last week and I really like this music player.

sycamorex · 12-31-2007, 10:28 PM

Ubuntu, or Ubuntu studio which by default has a low latency kernel

mohtasham1983 · 12-31-2007, 10:33 PM

I'm not really familiar with ubuntu studio. But I guess ubuntu can do anything that ubuntu studio does.

Tinkster · 12-31-2007, 10:51 PM

Did you guys see the 128 MB hard-drive issue?

Cheers,
Tink

mohtasham1983 · 12-31-2007, 11:40 PM

Sorry, I didn't notice that. Have you tried damn small?

dickgregory · 01-01-2008, 08:26 AM

Get a larger flash drive. 128MB is tiny by today's standards. I have a 4GB usb flash thumb drive and it's price was quite reasonable.

One thing to be careful about when you use flash memory for the OS. Flash has a limited number of write cycles. If you have anything on your system that makes frequent writes, don't use flash. For example, never use flash for swapping. That will destroy your flash in very short order.

I would consider using regular disk drives and putting the cpu in another room outside the studio. Maybe route the cables for keyboard, mouse, monitor, and cf reader etc through an insulated wall.

mdelude · 01-02-2008, 08:05 AM

Thank you all for your replies, but it appears I mis-led some of you. Sorry. This machine won't be used for studio work, it's just a music player. mohtasham1983, I like amarok as well. I have Linux Mint installed on another machine, and quickly found a few nice benefits of amarok.

The idea behind the card-reader is that I can have many small flash cards with "albums" on them, ie an SD card full of nothing but acoustic music, another with jazz, etc...

I'm using all flash based storage because I want this to be a quiet machine. I have a passively cooled CPU and no case fans, so except for the PSU fan, this machine makes no noise at all, a feature I'm not willing to give up. So a platter-based HDD is out of the question.

A few of you mentioned DSL, which was my first choice, but it didn't seem to have support for the card reader. I tried DSL-N as well, but that didn't work for the same reason. Plus I didn't care for the GUI very much.

After posting the initial post, I obtained a 2Gb CF. This opens up lots of opportunities, such as using a trimmed-down install of my favorite distro, Linux Mint, but leaves me with the issue of write cycles that dickgregory mentioned. I've read about read-only systems, but does anyone know of a step-by-step how-to for making such a system?

tommytomthms5 · 01-02-2008, 04:48 PM

my god have you guy ever heard of geexbox im reading the replies and wanna smack you dsl is not for multimedia

mdelude · 01-03-2008, 12:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tommytomthms5

my god have you guy ever heard of geexbox im reading the replies and wanna smack you dsl is not for multimedia

geexbox doesn't pick up my card reader. Plus the display was shaking for some reason, like the whole OS has Parkinson's disease. And all DSL needs is the ability to play MP3's, not a whole multimedia suite. Right on the DSL home page it says it can play MP3's. So, if you're going to have a bad attitude about others' honest attempts to help out, please make sure you have a better solution. FWIW, I feel DSL is much closer to what I needed.

Since the foundation of geexbox is a collection of menus, and there's no apparent way to open a terminal, it doesn't seem like I would be able to configure it to suit my needs. At the boot screen I believe I saw something about pressing F1 for boot options, but by the time that message appeared, the OS was already loading, so I missed my chance to enter options.

On a positive note, boot time was fantastic. Easily under 30 seconds booting off the CD.

It seems like geexbox is little more than a CD/DVD player, and I'm sure it does that well (aside than the shaking), but that's not what I'm looking for. My machine doesn't even have an optical drive, except the temporary one I'm using to install the OS.

Maybe when 2.0 is released it may work for me. I may give it a try just to put the 128MB CF card to use, but right now it's not going to happen. Besides, just this morning I finished the machine. I went with a stripped install of Linux Mint, which is working beautifully.

tommytomthms5 · 01-03-2008, 01:00 PM

the shaking thing ive experienced when using it on virtual box but it is a problem