> > Compile a kernel > > Put together a cheesy small OS image using busybox, irmp3, lcdproc and > > mpg123 (and other stuff as required). > > Make PC boot off network (from image on server) > > Make PC mount NFS drive with music > > Make PC play random files from mounted drive > > > > It's all good, and you can turn the PC off without shutting it down as > > it has no hard drive and everything's in RAM. > > > > Have fun. > > > > A > > Thanks :-) I don't think this PC is going to be networked on a daily > basis, just when the tunes need refreshing, but if I could manage an LFS > install then I'm sure I'd learn a lot. Did you find any really easy to > follow references for your system? I don't think my skills are quite up > to your level!
Seriously, it's not that hard. Most of this stuff just works, and even if you lack experience all you have to do is be able to follow instructions. There are a myriad resources on the web, and of course most are old hat now that you can buy an mp3 player the size of a matchbox with terabytes of lossless audio. Almost. A good reference I found was this: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-Box-HOWTO.html But also you should research IRMP3 http://irmp3.sourceforge.net/ If you are doing everything locally it is much easier. My list above becomes: Install favourite distro to hard drive Copy all music files to big partition Make PC play random files from hard drive Again, you could do this with Gentoo, but this is a simple setup, so pretty much any distro would do. The first lounge MP3 player I made did exactly this, and also had a cheesy web server running so I could connect to it and select songs. If you have a monitor attached then you can do stuff locally with a keyboard or mouse. If you want to get rid of the monitor it's fairly easy to wire up a small LCD to the parallel port and display song info on it. A
