Re: stereo component from laptop?

[Ognjen Bezanov <ognjen@mailshack.com>]

Heh, I'm in the process of a OSS project to build a standalone 
mp3/AAC/mp4/ogg/CD-Audio player, and its coming along nicely (well, it 
plays music - just need to sort out the LCD display + keypad, and I have 
not had much time to work on it lately).

But that isn't done yet, so I can't recommend you use it just yet ;-)

Currently (until the project is finished) what I did was to build an 
embedded system using the ESounD Daemon.

Basically its an old 75Mhz laptop, with 8 mb ram, a pcmcia wifi card 
(atheros chipset) and a 16 bit soundcard. The custom distro initialises 
the sound and wifi card, connects to my wireless network
and sets up a sound server. I can connect to it from any PC on the 
network and stream it music. This way me (and the rest of my family) can 
use their own computers (and the players they know) and stream music to 
the server, which is permanently connected to the HI-FI.

Actually I was surprised how easy it was, and am considering making a 
few more of these to connect to other stereos, that way I can pick from 
my laptop where I want the music to emerge.

Oh, and the distro fits on a 16mb CF card (it can fit in less, i'm 
saying about 4 meg, but I dont have a smaller CF card).

If you want I can send you the .img file for my sound server (but just 
to tell you, some work will be required for configuration, probably 
changing the ESSID/IP Addr of the network, and possibly a kernel 
recompile for your wifi-card).

If on the other hand, you want to use a standard distro, have a look at 
the ESD webpage
(http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/EsounD.html). It hasn't been updated in a 
while, but the program has so far worked flawlessly.  Just install that 
on your base distro and configure it - you will need a client-side 
plugin for it though, Most linux audio software supports it (i know 
there is a plugin for xmms) and i believe (but cannot confirm) that 
there exists a winamp plugin for it as well.

Hope this reply was of any use :-)


Matt Price wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> as a result of various events, I have an extra laptop and no cd
> player, so I would like to convert the laptop into a stereo
> component.  It's an HP Omnibook 4100, PII MMX 266, with 96 megs RAM, a
> pretty big hard drive (30 megs) and a CD-ROM (no DVD).  I'm trying to
> figure out which audio player to use and, more generally, how to
> configure the interface for maximum efficiency and ease of use by my
> (non-technical) family members.  
>
> Here's a few considerations:
>
> KERNEL:  
> I want to support my PCMCIA wireless card, the suspend2 kernel patches
> from suspend2.net, and hopefully ACPI, so I think I will go with a
> recent 2.6 kernel and udev.  I know this is a significant strain on
> the limited CPU/RAM resources, but I hope it's not fatal.  
>
> GUI:
> When I had a little more RAM in this machine I used XFCE4, but I'm
> wondering if I should switch to something even more stripped down.
> Because security is of limited importance now (I'd want anyone to be
> able to just start the thing up) I would also be interested in
> dropping WDM and just starting X directly (I used to do that at one
> point; don't really remember how, but am sure I can dredge it back
> up).  My only requirements are that it be pretty to look at and
> relatively intuitive for a Windows user (so, window behaviour should
> be pretty similar to 'doze).  
>
> PLAYER:
> The idea would be to play mp3's and cd's off of this thing.  
>
> My family hates using xmms; they find it hard to look at and a little
> disconcerting, I think mostly because ofthe multiple windows.  Also
> there's no built-in playlist manager, which confuses them.  
>
> I've lately taken to using Amarok on my desktop, which I find a pretty
> satisfying experience (though occacionally buggy, e.g. crashes when it
> encounters a radio stream it doesn't like).  But I hesitate to install
> something that depends so heavily on the kde environment to work.
> Haven't used Rhythmbox for a while, but it used to crash on my all the
> time when I did use it.  BMP is easier to look at than xmms is, but it
> still doesn't have a playlist manager (far as I can tell).  [by
> playlist manager I mean a usable GUI that lets you choose among
> playlist you've created.  Not sure this is the right term...]
>
> So none of the options with which I'm familiar seem perfect.  Does
> anyone have any suggestions?  Like, can amarok work without loading
> hundreds of megs of kde/qt stuff into memory?  Is there a playlist
> manager plugin for bmp?  
>
> It would be great if all of this worked well enough for a 10-year-old
> to be able to use it.  
>
> SOUND DAEMON:
> I'm used to using esd , seems to work ifne, thought I'd stick with it
> unless there are other suggestions...  
>
> Thanks much fory our help!
>
> Matt
>
>
>
> --------------------------
> .''`.       Matt Price 
> : :'  :      Debian User
> `. `'` 	     & hemi-geek
>  `-     
> -------------------------- 
>
>
>