Good evening!

I've just recovered an old 800 mhz laptop, and intended on migrating it to Linux. As a first question, I'd like to know what distribution you'd recommend for someone liking to learn and having mild unix/linux experience, but being a basic newbie in that domain.. (I was thinking slackware)

Also, I'd like to know, what audio playing software the linux users here, use.

Are any available for non-x-windows?
Thanks in advance,
Tristan.

On my 700mhz amaroK works wonders in KDE. Rythmbox is a really fast player in gnome.

About distros, ive always been a big ubuntu fan. First distro ive used (well, I did try DSL, but that was a live cd and not for long) and it works awesome. Super fast repositories (300KBps. Downloaded the 180MB of KDE in a couple minutes). Apt, from debian, is also wonderful.

Frankly, I think Linux should start out as a good disto with package management, with a great community. I second Ununtu also. It's built on Debian, which has a massive following, but the Ubu peeps are REALLY down to earth, and non-condescending. No matter how silly the question may seem to you, you will not have rocks thrown at you for not being an elitest. It's almost utopian at times. The themes of the packaging and whatnot really reflect the idea behind Ubuntu.

There are 2 distros that would work for you, Ubuntu or Kubuntu. The latter is just Ubuntu built around KDE instead of Gnome. I prefer Gnome. The Gnome version already has KDE dependencies built in it for runtime. In most cases, you can run KDE software fine on it, with a few extra dependencies being downloaded. Luckilly, Ubuntu is hassle free in that department.

Once you have your OS up, the music player is up to you. Do you need to transfer music via the audio software? What formats do you want to play? Media Library? No one can tell you want player is right for you....You just have to try them till one fits your music lifestyle. AmaroK and RythmBox are good examples of places to start, as they are generally well integrated softwares.

WINE + Foobar2000?

Distro -> Mandriva or Ubuntu
Audio Player -> amaroK

The distro I recommend is Fedora Core. Once you've got yum and the various repositories set up, then installing updates or getting new software is pretty easy.

For audio, I recommend amarok as well.

I think I'll go for a KDE based X -- I prefer amaroK better (from screenshots)

Is slackware a really bad choice? Or is it just configuration difficulty, etc.. do I need to compile my own stuff? -- I always have a second computer on windows to ask my favorite forum how to manage, just in case, so.. immersion shouldn't be a huge issue..

Thanks for your replies,
Tristan.

I suggest Gentoo. It can be highly optimized for various hardware. I like MPlayer.

I suggest NetBSD because I've heard it is rather lightweight and reasonably fast on modest hardware. Version 3.0 to be released soon, and the ports system is awesome.

As far as player software goes, check the following threads: thread 1, thread 2.

I've also set up an old computer with Linux and I really like Ubuntu. Being a Winamp diehard, I've found XMMS to be as close a replica as there is.

personally i'm a gentoo fan, but at 800mHz i'd rather suggest a binary distribution, unless you have some fast linux machine that could help with compiling (distcc is a tool for spreading the effort over more machines, similar to a cluster but specialized in compiling).
as for the media player... if you ever used foobar2000, there is no other player that'll satisfy you, so i'd recommend wine + foobar. even though it seems overkill, it performs really well - adding my whole music collection (from the database) takes literally few seconds, and that is >90GB off ogg vorbis. once you throw out all unneeded plugins it's competetive in resource usage to most current linux media players.
as for non-x-windows and even less resource hungry solutions you should try xmms2. it's very much in early development, but even at it's current state it's better than mpd (which has a similar approach), and really, REALLY lightweight but featuring a full blown database, gapless and replaygain. more info -> http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Main_Page

What binary distributions are there? (edit : is Ubuntu a good bet?)

debian unstable is my vote... (shocking! )

I had just trouble in my life with linux RedHat, Madrake, Fedora. Never managed to make more than 80% of the stuff working.

Life became beautiful when I discovered Gentoo. It saved my life. It is a lot of work initially, but it has a very good forum and once you are set-up things become easier.

I use it exclusively at home.

Triza

I tried amarok some months ago.

It has some nice features but
- gapless playback doesn't work
- skipping to the next song takes 1-2 seconds

Does anyone not experience these problems?

I switched to wine+foobar2k some time ago. Since the wine 0.9 release it runs very stable (can't remember any crashes).

First, I've never used Ubuntu, but I've heard nothing but good things about it. But from what I've used though, I can really recommend Gentoo.

Gentoo makes you/forces you to get a hint at least on how the system works and what makes it tick when you install it, but in the same time it's very easy to set up and use. Following the installation manual is a crash course in how linux works. And in practice I have found Gentoo to have the easiest and best system of installation and managing of programs.

As for the audioplayer, I use wine (a windows emulator) and foobar2000. I need the masstagging and renaming features too much for even trying other players... But I've used XMMS some (since I didn't know any other player that handled musepack files), the "standard" audio player of many distributions, and it works very well. It looks like winamp 2.x.

Well for a newbie, Ubuntu should do nicely, if it works... I still don't buy the Ubuntu *marketing* of painless install when it cannot boot after install on my hardware and failed to install on the rather standard hardware of several friends of mine. Still, if it works for you it should be a fairly good choice.
About the player, it depends on what you need :
-simple player -> xmms
-more functions -> Amarok
-geekish swiss army knife -> foobar2000 0.8.x +wine (my choice )

By the way, I am a debian testing/unstable guy who have been using Gentoo for 7 months, then removed it to get back to painless system administration. I've been spending too much time working around broken ebuilds and random versions transition quirks. This is no flaming, guys, just bad experience... And I did not really liked the fact that the simple, flawlessly working ebuild patch I gave to resolve some issues was blatantly ignored.
[edit:]players list and Gentoo experience

For a first time linux user, I surely recommends Ubuntu. Very easy to install and use.

If you really dive into it you could always take a look at gentoo or debian.

Why can't the Linux community come up with a foobar2000-inspired player? The number of people using Wine + foobar2000 is beginning to scare me. Not that i'm a big fan of Linux anyway, but this is certainly not what Linux was intended for.

I don't think it takes a community, either Linux or Windows.

> The number of people using Wine + foobar2000 is beginning to scare me.
Heh, I tend to believe that represents the number of people undergoing transition from Windows. It takes time to let it go and start evaluating existing Linux players instead.

Interesting that no-one has mentioned Suse 10. I installed it once and it seemed quite pleasant to use.

I recently switched from windows to Ubuntu - I'd highly recommend it!

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Quod Libet, the player I use. It's got a nice simple layout:

http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet/wiki/Screenshots

only drawbacks: no replaygain or gapless support , which seems to be the problems with most linux audio players!

Ed

Here's another vote for XMMS. But Amarok and Rhythmbox are also nice when I briefly played with them.

I agree that the package manager is very important. I use Debian, and I'm learning my way around Gentoo. Apt-get and portage are brilliant. Slackware lets you use either package manager, or none if you like.

Whatever distribution you choose, it might help if you use a light window manager instead of KDE or Gnome if your computer is dated.

A small correction. It does support Replay Gain (using and applying) quite well on all formats. The only thing is, that the Foobar sphere and the Linux sphere don't agree on RG in ID3v2 yet.
Apart from that it supports MPC, MP3, Vorbis, FLAC, Wavpack, Mods, AAC (MP4 excluding tag writing) quite well also.

Current Gstreamer is the cause for lack of gapless. QL did have gapless before it moved to use it.

Check out the SVN version!

EDIT: visual evidence

Thanks for your recommendations, guys.. Ubuntu is INFINITELY less intensive than slackware.

Let's take things the slow way, shall we? (it doesn't even _FEEL_ like linux.. Oh well!)

Does anyone know if WINE works well with photoshop?

Thanks in advance,
Tristan.

I don't know if it does or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is possible to use photoshop with Wine. More recent versions are probably less likely to work well than older versions of course.

But you'd probably be better off just using the Gimp.

Are you saying xmms2 supports these features as well (I know mpd has them)? I couldn't seem to find anything related to gapless playback on the xmms2 wiki...

After long searches, I've settled on mpd and a couple of frontends (the included command-line mpc, ncmpc, gmpc and FoxyTunes), and even though it does all I want, I'm open to investigating an alternative.

I've also used foobar 0.8 + wine for a while but its lack of integration with any desktop environment made me switch. Also something was going wrong in combination with wine, since more than once I've had my files corrupted after updating the tags with foobar.

For mass tagging and renaming under Linux, EasyTag simply rocks. Supports FLAC, Vorbis, MP3, APE and MPC, does CDDB lookups and has some other nifty features like auto track numbering and a powerful "scanner" feature which allows one to modify data in tag fields, and even fill tags based on arbitrary patterns matching the filename. Highly recommended.

I use MPD plus gmpc since XMMS1 is too unstable (running AMD64 Debian Unstable here).

well, seems it does work: http://appdb.winehq.org/screenshots.php?appId=17&versionId=
but if does work well - i don't know.

as for distro recommendations, i also heard lots of good opinions on archlinux. a very good point about gentoo has been made earlier in this thread - you really get to learn a lot of (useful!) stuff while installing it, yet it shouldn't be hard at all with the gentoo installation handbook. i still think it's overkill for your hardware though.
i'd also suggest you stay away from kde/gnome, since you probably don't have much ram either... even on my machine (512mB ram, athlon xp 1800+) with moderate settings it's far from perfect. i'd suggest a lightweight window manager like fluxbox or a light desktop environment if you need "userfriendly" bloat like clickey icons on the desktop - xfce is nice (i use it... without the icons )

Slightly OT: There is a very cool and free way to try out Linux without leaving your familiar Windows environment.

Install the free VMware Player, and use it to run the pre-built Ubuntu Virtual Machine.

You'll have access to a fully functional Linux - virtual - host from within Windows with just a few minutes of work.

Yes, it works very well. As I remember the only thing that didn't work perfectly straight away when I tried it, was using fullscreen mode. But that might have something to do with the window manager, and not wine+photoshop.

Two years ago Disney(!) payed the wine developers to make it work. See http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1210083,00.asp

Well, I do not know why people generally keep using foobar2000, but I do because there is no equivalent. I transited to Linux one year ago and every music player I tried was a deception. There is no foobar equivalent at all. The only foobar-like player is under heavy developpement and is definitely not usable.
Lamip
[edit:]missing words

Fsck I'm a retard..

sudo "chmod -R 777 /usr/"

Ubuntu installed perfectly for me.

About foobar... Uh, honestly, why does everyone keep saying it is some super useful swiss army knife that does everything? I use it as my player of choice and find it to be very minimal and light on resources. Do I have some different version then everyone or something? Nothing wrong with it, its the best player ive seen...

foobar can be configured to wash, peel, and fry potatoes. It's that versatile. It just takes a little while getting used to, that's all.

LOL!, don't get me started on what Foobar can do

No equivalent, probably, does it justifies heavily relying on WINE, not sure.
Well, dunno about foobar-like players, there aren't many for win world as well, so no wonder.
Still quite a few nu projects has popped up recently. Major part are those gst/xine frontends with iTunish GUI, there are couple of more interesting ones... I think one can find a suitable one at least in music playing part.

Yeah, sure the playing part can be fulfilled but I really do need the flexible collection management, custom tagging support, two clicks transcoding, replaygain scan and support, flawless freeDB tagging support (easytag often fails to code foreign characters), easy massive flexible rule-based tagging and renaming.
I could surely find some of these functions on current Linux players but I do not want to lose any of these. This is the point. I do not only use foobar2000 to listen to music and in different linux programs I cannot find all of my beloved functionalities, and I do not even talk about their seamless integration.
To conclude, the casual listener can surely survive without foobar2000 but I cannot; I would spend soooo much time doing braindead tasks without it.

Gapless doesn't work for me either.

I for one couldn't care less about transcoding and don't see any significance in having tagger/rg scanner integrated. But maybe one can implement it on top of some existing player.
I mean, hardly anything will appear that features all the bells and whistles already from beginning. And it hardly get those features if everyone's on WINE

I second, but recommend XMMS.

I can't really add anything to the discussion of which Linux distribution to choose, as everything I could say has already been said. However, should you ever find yourself with a faster CPU, you might want to look into Gentoo.

As far as the music player goes, you'll have a number of choices. I use Quod Libet myself, mostly because of the flexible music library. QL comes with a nice little tagger as well, called Ex Falso. I've found it very useful, though I am unsure if it has support for CDDB, freedb, MusicBrainz, etc. I also tried BMP at one point before I decided to go with QL. BMP has actually been discontinued (though a fork of it now exists as Audacious), and the developers are now working on BMPx, which I'm going to put through the paces in the next few days.

QL and BMPx are both GTK+ based applications. Unfortunately, the only KDE/QT media player I have experience with is JuK, and only about 45 seconds at that. I'm not sure how it compares with Amarok.

Hope you enjoy your experience with Linux!

The computer in question is an athlon xp mobile 1500+.

Of the important criterion for the player are :
replaygain support
lightweightedness (amarok is.. a bit heavy)
gapless playing (amarok seems to lag between tunes...)
I like a lot how amarok guesses how much you like a tune | album from how much you play them, and can later make playlists of your preferred music. That's a feature I'd like to keep.

That's basically it.

Peace,
Tristan.

Yesterday I tried the Ubuntu thingie from a live CD. It really looks nice, I just wish it worked properly....
I got crashes all over... from the desktop app to more obscure ones... Sadly it's unusable
I think I'll definitively won't be installing linux very soon on my system together with Windows. Windows has been rock solid for me and I just hope this little experiment didn't f*k things up.
My advice is to use a live CD before installing so you are sure linux works in your system.