Music Centre

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Hi all,
I have decided on making my own IPod Music Centre. But its not going to be hand held, and its not going to need a piece of software running on another pc to download to.

The idea is very simple. Make a little application that plays music cd’s. If the user wants to, they could burn that cd onto the HD giving it a simple name they could reference back to it. Then they could go back to their library and play anything they want from it. In theory, the java program is simple, but it needs to be very fast.

Now the problem is, i have a 233Mhz machine. Im going to use Linux and i need the distro to be as small as possible and as fast as possible so that when I click on, its on like a flash! While still having java support. Btw, does java on linux require X11 to be there?

So which distro should i strip down? Ive heard alot of good things about Gentoo and Debian. I have tried Slackware and that was very nice…Which is easier?

Btw, i need Linux 2.6x kernel to be there. I know that gentoo is very very customisable, but debian is stable and the like…

Any ideas?

#2

Btw, does java on linux require X11 to be there?

No (iirc). There is a headless flag… using it you can also use awt and the like (eg for a server which generates images).

Btw there is a free lib for java cd stuff. Forgot it’s name… ah yea… google… http://www.jsresources.org/examples/audio_cdda.html

#3

Thank you for the link onyx. Would you by any chance remeber that flag?

#4

No. But google knows ;D

-Djava.awt.headless=true

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/awt/AWTChanges.html

#5

Thx onyx. Ive spoken to my school (its a technology college thing, UK) and they said they are going to sponsor me doing this! ;D

They are going to give me all the hardware, one of my mates is gonna be designing me a shell for it.

Now the question still remains, whis Linux distro to strip?

DP

#6

What about Damn Small Linux?

It’s supposed to be a small distro (fits on a business card IIRC), sounds like it could be what you are looking for.

#7

Yes, ive seen that one, but it seems to specialise for what i want to accomplish.

Ie. their mix of X stuff for window displays.

I have decided to download Slackware 10.0 (that was my first ever distro, and i love it!) and strip that down. All thats going to be left in the kernel is PS2 keyboard, HD Controller, Sound driver, and an LCD display driver (not tft, but lcd, like a car stereo).

Ive done that and the boottime on a 233Mhz machine is around the 10 second mark (thats with initialising java and the program).

Im going to have to make some more improvements me thinks :-/

DP

#8

10 seconds isn’t that bad, some cell phones take that much time to start up.

#9

but for what it is, which is essentially a cd player + some other gimmicks, im going to have to decrease that start up time considerably. Cell phones are much more complicated than this.

Another question, does anyone know how to get rid of that stupid bios start up screen? Just going straight to LILO without the need to do a memory check…

DP

#10

might interest you.

#11

OoOooOOooO, just what im lookin for! Thanks mojo.

Now to see if this bugger of a beaute works on my motherboard…

DP