Hi..

I have plans to convert my old Pentium 166MHz PC
with 16 MB RAM, to a music player / Juke box.

But I am new to this. Will I have to select a kernel
and install necessary packages to run a juke box
/ player application?

Am I lucky enough to get a ready made distribution
for the purpose? Any suggestions and comments are welcome. I checked LIMP distro in sourceforge But its hardware requirements are much higher than what I have.

Please advice on which distribution I should chose.

Thanks
Ajan

You want to look for a minimum distribution to start with. Look at feather, puppy, mu, or DSL distributions. Puppy and DSL are live too.

However - you may be happy with a text only install of something like RH9.

It is your 16MB RAM that will be the sticking point. Linux generally requires 64Mb minimum. Especially if you want a graphical environment. You may be well advised to go looking for old hardware to cannibalise the RAM from.

I don't know of any specific distributions for this...

I'd start off installing something very minimal. If you know what you are doing then debian would be good. If your less confident DSL Linux is aimed at lower spec computers and you can run scripts on it to install it to hard disk.

I'd reccommend a small windowmanager my personal preference would be fluxbox or Oroborus if your adventurous.

I'd then suggest a light weight media player. xmms is good as it is light weight and has a very flexible playlist with jump to track and other options.

This will run fast and reliably, you can even script xmms to load with fluxbox or oroborus if the machine is for one purpose.

If you want to get more adventurous you may have to play arround with other media players.
You may be able to run without a window manager at all, I did this for a 133 that i set up to only be a remote terminal client for a MS server (the only thing that loaded with X was the rdesktop application with the commands to connect to (but not log into) the MS server).

Debian requires more ram for install than to run. You can install the OS on a computer with more RAM and then just swap the hard disk over.