What flavor of linux for an old laptop for playing mp3s?

Sgraffite

Sgraffite

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I have an old laptop that I use to play mp3s on at work. Currently it has windows XP on it, and I play the mp3s with Winamp by using the hotkeys.

I'm upgrading the hard drive from a 10gb to a 30gb so I can fit more music on it, and I thought it might be fun to put linux on it.

What version of linux could I use to reproduce the same functionality? It doesn't necessarily need to have a GUI, it just needs to run on the laptop and have software available that can play mp3s and supports hotkeys.

The laptop is a Pentium 233 MMX with 256mb of ram. I believe the sound card is a Yamaha YMF262.
 
probably puppy or damn small with some of the media libraries installed.
 
Pretty much anything with a lightweight desktop environment will work just fine. XFCE and LXDE would be the lightweight environments I'm speaking of. Using a more popular distribution would be beneficial for maximum support as well.

Ubuntu and Fedora both come in LXDE/XFCE spins. You can really choose anything you wish though.
 
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll have to try some out this weekend hopefully.

I tried running DSL off of a live cd, but it runs out of memory trying to load the OS + filesystem + audio drivers all in memory. I also RIP Linux, XBMC, and Dynebolic live cds and ran into lack or memory and/or lack of video compatibility. It looks like I'll have to actually install linux to the hard drive to be able to test any distros.

Does anyone know which linux media playing software has hotkey support by chance?
 
Have you considered slimming down xp and turning off services? Maybe even shut off explorer and just set the media player as the shell.
 
Sgraffite said:
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll have to try some out this weekend hopefully.

I tried running DSL off of a live cd, but it runs out of memory trying to load the OS + filesystem + audio drivers all in memory. I also RIP Linux, XBMC, and Dynebolic live cds and ran into lack or memory and/or lack of video compatibility. It looks like I'll have to actually install linux to the hard drive to be able to test any distros.

Does anyone know which linux media playing software has hotkey support by chance?
Click to expand...

I believe that audacious does. I can verify at home later.
 
450 said:
Have you considered slimming down xp and turning off services? Maybe even shut off explorer and just set the media player as the shell.
Click to expand...

That's what I do currently, I just wanted to experiment a little :)
 
It might be a fun experiment but, from a power consumption perspective, you'd be better off just getting an MP3 player.
 
I didn't think most pentium chipsets supported 256M ram. Are you sure it's a pentium & not p2 or p3 ?
 
Robstar said:
I didn't think most pentium chipsets supported 256M ram. Are you sure it's a pentium & not p2 or p3 ?
Click to expand...

I was surprised it supported 256MB myself, it originally only had 32MB of ram in it. Somewhere I found 2x 256MB EDO SODIMMS, so I installed those. Unfortunately it can only see 128MB of each.

p233laptop.gif
 
Wow i be that thing crawls in XP.

I love puppy for old computers. You may get by with an xfce distro but it will likely be pretty slow.
 
FibreChanMan said:
Jolicloud Linux seems to be great for that sort of thing. Small footprint too.
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What? Maybe if it where a pentium 3 i could see jolicloud working out but it would be downright awful with his hardware.

Jolicloud REQUIRES a 500Mhz processor and 384mb of ram and with that hardware it would be painfully slow a 233 mhz processor would just choke.
 
Yeah you're probably right about painfully slow. I was hoping someone would say that it's bearable enough on that hardware since app installs are so easy with it (even though most are web-based apps that open through chromium.....). I'm a fan of Jolicloud since it was the one distro out of the box to work great with all of the hardware on my Dell Mini 9 laptop, including the Broadcom Wireless NIC that most distros have issues with out of the box (and with my luck not even after using different drivers did I get it to work or be stable). Plus the performance was perfect for me.

I actually had a P233 laptop back in the day, an NEC Versa if I recall. What I had on it that worked well was a minimal install of Slackware. I had the install as minimal as I could stand (2gb HDD on that bad boy) and ran fluxbox, or the lighter version it was based on that I can't remember the name of anymore. I used the XMMS GUI for MP3s, but I found on google that it does have hot keys available and command line capabilities. I think I also used KDE, but eventually moved to fluxbox for more performance. Here's more info on the XMMS commands/hotkeys:

http://memory.xmms.org/xmms_v1.2/documentation.html#section-1.9
 
There are some good ideas in jolicloud i just stick with a full distro on my netbook though. I do like how the chrome app and desktop stay mostly in sync, was a pretty cool idea.
 
After doing some reading I decided to try Puppy linux out. One of the reason I decided to go with that is it has a small footprint, and the Live CD actually worked with on the old laptop.

Also it supposedly comes with xmms, which is probably the ideal mp3 playing software for me as it has all the same default hotkeys as Winamp, which is what I currently use.

Upon installing Puppy, xmms is nowhere to be found. I did some more reading and it looks like xmms stopped working in version 4.0 of Puppy. After that xmms2 came about for later releases of Puppy. However, I don't see xmms2 available from the package manager.

How would I go about getting xmms2 installed?
 
I installed TXZ Pup which has xmms as a part of it by default.

Now I'm having trouble getting Alsa to recognize my sound card. I do the legacy scan and it doesn't detect anything.

I added this manually to /etc/modprobe.config
Code: 
alias snd-card-0 snd-opti92x-ad1848
alias sound-slot-0 snd-opti92x-ad1848
options snd-opti92x-ad1848 irq=5 dma1=1 isapnp=no

I'll have to do some more reading to figure out the correct sound configuration it seems.
 
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