Re: Laptop recommendation? (mp3, mplayer)

[Kent Borg <kentborg-rhl borg org>]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 01:15:58PM +0200, Thomas Ribbrock wrote:
> I'm currently looking into buying a small(ish) laptop that I intend to use
> mainly for Internet Radio (mplayer/RealAudio) and MP3 playing[0], preferably
> running RHL 7.3.
> 
> The question is: What kind of resources would I need for this? Is a P133
> good enough? Do I need more than 32MB RAM? If anybody has some experience
> with that kind of setup, I'd appreciate some hints as to what works well.
> 2nd hand laptops are still quite expensive (EUR200,- will buy you something
> in the range of a P133/32MB/1GB here), hence knowing the minimum necessary
> might save quite some money... :-)

I have an old Sony Vaio PCG-Z505LE.  It is quite small, and I am right
now using it to listen to a college radio station from Spain as I also
ssh into my basement server to write this e-mail.

You will want more than 32 MB of RAM because key software requires you
be running X, and X really wants to run on a machine with more.  I
have done it on a 64 MB machine and it is a bit annoying.  My notebook
has 192 and that is really quite nice--so you don't need an infinite
amount of RAM.

My Vaio is not completely supported by Red Hat 7.2 and its internal
speakers are too small to listen to directly.  (But it sounds great
through a cheap Cambridge Soundworks speakers.  I put one of the
tweeters right on top of the single base speaker for much a better
phase relationship and therefore much better sound than putting it on
the floor, a place where only a true SUBwoofer might be suited to.)

I use XMMS for mp3 streams.  I haven't convinced Mozilla and plugger
to send all clicks for mp3's to it, some I have to fire through
something like "lynx --source someURL.pls" to get a URL that XMMS will
understand.

I also managed to one day find a free Linux version of Realplayer that
works pretty well.  It isn't as stable as XMMS and it is hard to find
on Real's web site.  Realplayer I always have to fire up by hand, for
some reason Mozilla crashes every time I click on a Realaudio stream.

For Quicktime and MS Windows Media Player streams I am up the creek
and don't have a way to hear them.  (Maybe running them under wine
would help...)  Luckily there are plenty of things to listen to with
XMMS and Realplayer.

As for CPU speed, I have a 645 MHz PIII in this thing and it works.
In the little 64 MB machine I referred to earlier there was a
233-something Cyrix and it could also do it, I don't know how close to
the edge it was.


So I am guessing a used laptop in the "P133/32MB/1GB"-range will be
too little.  But if you double each of those numbers (P266/63MB/2GB) I
think you will have a prety good time.


Let us know how it goes,

-kb