I am currently working on a project involving an old box and creating a good mp3 player for my car.

Which distro would be good for running a player without too much hassle as to installing and disc space if i want a GUI and means to controlling it by normal keyboard...

i was thinking of using an old tft screen i have lying around mounted in the glove compartment... but the general req. for me are.
1. ease of install.
2. gui for running road maps
3. support for lan
4. loads of mp3´s
5. possible GPS solution later.

And yes. i am a noob at linux....

I'v just fininshed writing (version 1) a perl front end for mplayer. It rips from Audio CDs using cdda2wav converts them to mp3 using lame and stores all track info in a searchable database.

My idea is the same as yours - to make in in car jukebox. As soon as I buy myself a decent laptop that is. I am also thinking of creating an lfs distro to run it on.