Last week i helped one of my friends move to his new house. After packing all he needed, we found an old PII (256 ram) system down at the basement. I've been wondering what to do with the system instead of leaving it with the rest of his junk for the garbage guy to pick up. I've decided to turn it into a linux mp3 juke box and connect it to my stereo system.

To do this, i'll probably have to re-compile the kernel, remove most of the stuff i won't need and go from there. Also i will like the setup to have web interface. I'm thinking of sticking in a wireless card too so i can listen to my music anywhere around the house with my PDA.

Any suggestion guys? Anyone know of any linux distro geared towards this kind of thing? What else can i do with this computer?

I did something like that some time ago, I did a full install of Simply Mepis on a P2 Dell Latitude CPI laptop. I didnt do anything special apart from load all my MP3s on it, and insert a wireless card. I was able to stream this to anywhere I had wireless connection.

Mepis has a lot of multimedia codecs and plug ins installed by default in any case, what u want is a glorified file server.

Samba plays very well with windows networking and you should be able to access this box from your main machine without any problem.

Thanks for the quick reply. I don't want to use this system for anything other than store and serve mp3. I already have a linux box. Do i really need samba? I was thinking of using a database (MySQL) and PHP web interface with embedded  media player.

Won't installing full Simply Mepis clog up the system? I'm trying to save on hard drive space.

If you dont want all the bloatware, you could try installing Ubuntu in server form. In any case, I dont think a full mepis install will use up to a gig? Never checked it b4.

Am not saying you should use samba. I am not personally akin to using terminal so I would install a gui for myself. Mepis has Mepis Lite specifically designed for old hardware such as yours.