Small distro as "mediacenter"
 

Hi all!

I have an old laptop (PIII 600mhz, 320mb RAM) that I want to turn into a "mediacenter"-thingy. I currently run XP Pro on it but that's quite painfull to work with on this old machine so I thought I should install linux on it.

What distribution would be a good choice if my only needs are:

* Windowmanager (simple as possible)
* Webaccess
* Multimedia-player (xvid, mpeg, mp3 etc)
* DC-GUI

And that's it, so it should be as stripped down as possible.


Any suggesstions?


thanx!


/Mathias!

If you want a "stripped down" but graphical distro, you could always look at Damn Small Linux, a spin-off of Knoppix. It was originally designed to boot and run off a "business card" (50Mb) CD-R, but has since been adapted to install on USB pen drives, hard disks and even those ultra-low-power Mini-ITX PCs which boot off a CF card.

How suitable DSL would be for what you want to do, I don't know, but you can boot and run it from the CD first if you want to give it a test run. DSL includes XMMS, but I'm not sure how easy it is to set up for video - try the DSL site for more info.

Also: DSL versions after 0.9 (0.9.2 is just out) include Firefox, which is a great improvement on Dillo. The window manager is Fluxbox, which is quite different from GNOME/KDE, but minimalist in a quite pleasing way.

It's a 50Mb download for the ISO, so if you can manage that, DSL could be worth a try.

Tim

Debian or Gentoo...

Easy to install: probably knoppix or KnoppMyth. (Both Debian Based)

Cool