[clue-tech] Low-memory laptop for a jukebox

[Chris]

Hey there everyone,

I'm looking (well, right now, just thinking about) creating a
jukebox-type of machine out of an old laptop that I have, and I'm
looking for some suggestions on setup, distribution choice  ... or
someone to talk me out of it because I'm just asking too much out of an
old machine.

I've ripped my CD's to MP3 and have them stored centrally on my main
machine here at home.  I can export the directory they are stored on as
NFS or SMB, it doesn't matter to me but I would probably use nfs since I
don't have any windows machines.

The machine that I want to use as the jukebox (and that will be
connected to my main stereo) is an older laptop that I have.  It's an
IBM iSeries, which I believe is an old pentium 266MhZ machine with
around 128MB of ram.  It was running Windows 98 before I got ahold of
it.

What I"d like to do is install linux on the laptop and connect it to my
home stereo so that I can play all of my MP3's from the laptop which in
turn is just pulling the MP3's off of an NFS share on the home server.
Would be nice if the laptop was running some sort of Webserver so that I
could just click on a filename and have it play out of the home system.

Have heard of MythTV and the like but I think that this system isn't
powerful enough to run that.  Maybe one day I'll upgrade the hardware
but right now I'm just looking for a geek project.

Any suggestions?  What distro should I throw on here (no need for it to
run X), any suggestions for a jukebox, etc?  I've looked at puppy and
DSL but not sure; I've always used the big boys before (RedHat, SuSE,
mandrake, Ubuntu, etc).  Also, the CD drive is toast so I'm going to
have to do a floppy boot and network install if that makes any
difference.

Thanks in advance ..

-Chris