[ltp] Setup for X20 as music player:

[Richard]

I now have a perfect X20, as described above, which is totally silent, and 
ideal as a music-playing system. For anyone interested, here's what I did:


1)Purchased X20 on eBay for $50. (HDD and PSU missing)

2)Purchased a mini-pci wifi card, and antenna (also ebay)

3)Purchased a 1GB CF card, and a CF/notebook_IDE adaptor ($3).


4)Opened up thinkpad; installed wifi+antenna + IDE-adaptor.
HDD door now stuck in place via balsa-wood.

5)On desktop machine, I cloned a functioning and fully 
configured Mandriva2006 install (updated from seerofsouls.com to KDE 
3.5.3). Create a single directory containing a copy of /.

Then, chroot into it, and use urpme and rpm -e to remove packages until it 
is below 900 MB.  I deleted the urpmi package sources, but retained 
/var/lib/rpm. I removed ALL of the draktools (mcc, rpmdrake etc), since 
they have nearly 1GB of dependencies! Then, finish up with rm -rf
(/usr/share/doc, some of the fonts, unused bits of X... use du -sh * to 
locate the bloat)

I did manage to keep kde + amarok + konqueror + decent fonts + konsole 
+ ssh + flash + mplayer/vlc + some games.
[Firefox is removed, and re-installed with the latest mozilla.org version 
in $home/bin]


6)Copy onto CF card - boot the X20 with Knoppix (in a borrowed Docking 
station), then:
   fdisk    (1 partition, no swap)
   mkfs.reiserfs
   copy over / from source machine
   chroot into CF card's root and run lilo
   fix fstab on card to be accurate.
Reboot

7)Use fuse/sshfs to mount the remote music directory (make it 
read-only for safety).  Use amarok for playing back

8)Optimise: most daemons not required. This includes haldaemon and dbus
  (KDE doesn't really need them; they can even be uninstalled with rpm -e 
--nodeps)


Note: X20 is about minimal spec for this. 1GB is also rather close to 
minimal, but it is adequate.

Note2: The X20 also has a CF-slot next to the PCMCIA slot. Sadly, this 
isn't bootable.

Note 3: 256 MB RAM is *required* - there is no swap!

Note4: See previous post regarding fan control.



I hope that is of use/interest to people!

Best wishes,

Richard