stereo component from laptop?
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
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.''`. Matt Price
: :' : Debian User
`. `'` & hemi-geek
`-
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