Distro for P120 Jukebox?

[Kranitz]

I have a Hewlett Packard C110 with a pentium 120Mhz, 1GB HD and 40MB's of ram. I want to use it in a seperate room to play mp3's. What would be a good linux distro for this?
I've tried slackware, DSL, mandrake, and debian with no luck.

 

[evongugg]

Vector Linux (Standard) for older hardware has support for mp3.

LiMP-Linux Multimedia Player

Linux Multimedia Player is a tiny Linux-based Live distribution that converts your computer into a multimedia player. It supports most of the known formats (MPEG 1 and 2, DivX, WMV, qt-mov, Real, MP3, WAV, WMA, and Ogg, VCD and DVD). It has auto-detection of harddisk (IDE, SATA, or SCSI) and sound, video, and network cards, USB storage device and supports all cards as of kernel 2.6.15. It identifies the filesystems and mounts them in the folder “START”. Network support can be configured through a friendly GUI. Windows Shares, Linux SMB shares can also be mounted and accessed inside the folder “START”. It has menu-driven options and requires no knowledge of Linux, all in an embedded image file of size 26 MB. It can be easily integrated into Windows XP/2000/98/95, a Linux boot loader, or bootable CD-ROM.
This distro, uses the powerful MPLAYER, and user friendly XMMS ( a clone of WINAMP), to give a better interface to play all VIDEO, AUDIO formats plus VCD and DVD.
The entire program is loaded in memory and runs only from the memory.

 

[bmouring]

When you say

I've tried slackware, DSL, mandrake, and debian with no luck.

what exactly do you mean? Not fast enough or wouldn't playback mp3's?

Also, in terms of your goals, do you want an mp3 stream server or a player (presumably hooked up to a stereo system of some sort)? Just trying to get a better idea of what you want to accomplish.

 

[Kranitz]

The DSL live CD was the only one I could get to work, and that was by setting the "cheatcode" dsl vga=normal at boot. I've been trying to boot & root Vector via floppy, but it just loads the root floppy into ramdisk and does nothing. The mobo I'm using only supports booting from A &or C, so is there anyway for me to copy vector onto the HD with another computer, or another boot floppy perhaps?

 

[bmouring]

The DSL live CD was the only one I could get to work, ...The mobo I'm using only supports booting from A &or C, so is there anyway for me to copy vector onto the HD with another computer, or another boot floppy perhaps?

How did the DSL liveCD boot in your system if the mobo can only boot from floppy or hard disk? Either your system can boot from cd or you used a stand-in boot floppy.

Also, perhaps a bit more detail about what happened when you tried to install the other distros might be helpful.

As for how to work with the Vector Linux floppies, you need to have one of the Vector Linux install cd's; the floppies are only for systems (possibly) like yours that cannot boot from cdrom. The instructions here detail what you need to do after booting the floppies to install. Basically, you use the boot+root floppies to start the installer (which then uses the cdrom).

Another distro that has an installation method like this is Debian. Just FYI.

 

[Kranitz]

Well the two bootdisk img's I have from the Vector site are of the slackware 10.1 sata.i boot disk. I however keep getting an error about the root disk, complaining it isn't compressed right, then the kernel panics?

 

[bmouring]

That sounds to me like there's corruption of the image on the floppies. These floppies are very tightly packed and therefore need a disk that is free from bad sectors. I'd try reloading the images onto different (new if possible) floppies, making sure to follow the provided instructions on loading the images.

The error likely occurs because the base root filesystem is compressed in the floppy images and while trying to decompress there's an error, just in case you were curious.