MediaPlayer Linux?

I'm thinking about making something similar to Dell's MediaDirect or HP's Quickplay (which I do not have on the nc8430).

Simple Linux distro, boots in a few sections preferably, and just does media and/or internet browsing. I'd also like some type of drive lock for the browsing, like a write-protection scheme on the entire OS install (think Deep Freeze and you have the right idea). Internet access is optional, but it would be nice.

Preferably, I'd like to only give it read access (not write access) to all my other partitions to protect them as well (not that Linux has a lot of viruses out or anything!). I would mostly likely use something that is as capable as DivX for MP3s, MPEGs, AVI files, CDs & DVDs and the like.

I wouldn't really worry too much about drivers for any of my peripherals, and would only need drivers for whatever is built into my laptop. I'd "disable" Linux's seeing other USB (and similar) devices out-side of my laptop (except for my external HDDs).

Is there anything out there like that, or am I working on this one on my own? I'm not too serious about the project yet, but I think it would be nice if I could allocate a few GBs for the project and use it.

 

Well, I'd start with a distribution that boots very fast to begin with. Arch, Gentoo, and Slackware would all be very good options there. Then compile a stripped down kernel, and if you like rewrite the init scripts for your specific hardware and software needs. Any of these should be able to accomplish a 15 second boot, grub to login, with the included init scripts. I'd think simplified scripts may be able to accomplish closer to 10 seconds.

You'd probably want to set things up to automatically login and start X, or maybe even better, a DirectFB session with a media player started. This is easily enough done. Just set your /etc/inittab to the 5th runlevel, and make sure your x:5 line looks something like this (replacing username of course)

x:5 nce:/bin/su username -l -c "/bin/bash --login -c startx >/dev/null 2>&1"

Something like Fluxbox, Blackbox, or even Ratpoison would do well for the window manager. Media player is a tougher call, maybe the OSD xine interface, I don't know.

 

Geexbox?

http://geexbox.org/en/index.html

 

@Greg - This is the answer:

 

As I remember geexbox didn't have an Install to HD option. Has this changed?

 

http://geexbox.org/en/doc.html#installator

 

Nice, I might replace my Linux swap with geexbox & just point to it with my GAG bootloader.