On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 16:31, you wrote: > > I'm a bit delayed here too as the last x days of missing messages just > arrived, all 204 of them... > > A friend is donating me an old win98 machine[1] to turn into a headless > mp3 player - it would have to boot and start randomly playing from a > collection without any user interaction beyond the on button. Would this > be a good place to start with gentoo or should I be looking at a fuller > & simpler beginning? > > cheers, > > Andy > > [1]I have no idea at all on the spec, sorry...
You *could* do this with Gentoo. I did it with LFS (Linux from Scratch) and other internet resources. I made a 4Mb bootable image, put it on my server, then got a network card boot chip from www.rom-o-matic.net. IIRC the steps are something like: 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
