Well, I finally got my hands on a low-end machine (hmmm... that seems
backwards). This one is a cast off of my brothers and is a Compaq
Deskpro P60 or something with 48MB RAM. Has a 2GB HDD. I'm putting
in a 10/100 realtek PCI nic and want to put in a soundblaster. I plan
on mounting my machine's MP3 drive via NFS on this little box and
hooking it up to my home stereo. Since the home stereo is a Harman
Kardon amp with Nuance speakers, I obviously want the best soundcard I
can get to take advantage of the system it'll be connecting to.
I was thinking of the sb live platinum 5.1. It has that front panel
with the infrared remote control and such. It's a little pricy for us
Canadians, so I want to make sure it'll do what I hope it will. Has
anyone run one of these beasties under Linux? Specifically, I'm
hoping there is some way to make the remote control xmms if possible.
I want this box to be headless or, if necessary, have it connected to
my TV (I have no idea if this is possible... I know you can get video
cards to bring the TV *in*, but is there a video card to put the video
out to a TV, and if so, what kind?). Considering how much of this
stuff is onboard (it is a Compaq), I'm not sure if another videocard
will work on it (anyone know?). If nothing else, is there some kind
of convertor to take a standard VGA out to a TV in? Maybe that might
be the easiest way (although I have no idea if this kind of thing
exists). All I want is a way to see what xmms is doing so i can
change songs or something (if the remote doesn't work).
Maybe there's a better way to do this with a console app, like
mpg123... I mean, I can ssh into the box from another machine and get
it to start playing, but that's kind of a pain in the butt and I'd
rather avoid it if necessary.
As you can see, I haven't the first clue about this sort of thing. I
absolutely horrible with electronics, and I've followed some mp3-box
"how-to's" out there about buying an LCD display you connect to your
serial port to display what songs are playing and some really funky
ways to control the player with a remote. I'm looking for a
relatively cheap way to do it (the platinum would be the most
expensive component considering I got this machine free, I don't want
to spend much more than the cost of the soundblaster card).
Anyone done this or am I asking the impossible? Heck, it might be
impossible to get Linux installed on this thing... I haven't even
tried that yet (talk about getting way ahead of myself). Anyways,
it's a weekend project and I was wondering if someone had an
experience with something like this so I'm not beating a dead horse if
someone else has a magic recipe or knows of some programs that will do
what I want.
Thanks muchly in advance.
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