I recently received a free st1200! I had been considering a Homepod, but found their interface to be lacking search features; and the st1200 is the perfect candidate for an mp3/ogg/wav player. My initial intension was to NOT remove the hd, and thus stick with the already installed win95 and use winamp2.9x with its mini-browser. However, I was unable to get drivers to work with the 3com 10/100 pcmcia ethernet card I had bought. So... I followed these steps to get a great linux based audio player up and running with minimal effort and maximum features.
1) install and configure ZipSlack (Slackware's cool umsdos fs distro that is installed on and booted from an existing win32 fs) http://www.slackware.com/zipslack - I used a 100mb pcmcia ata card to shuttle zipslack.zip onto the st1200
2) add pen startup to rc scripts, modify rc scripts to load sound modules upon boot
3) install xorg configured for neomagic display and fpit pointer drivers; select a lightweight wm (I picked fvwm2 and added my fav. webcasts to the menu)
4) add startx for non-root user to rc scripts
5) install xmms and required audio packages
Since I am using my st1200 as a gnump3d http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/index.html client, I decided it would be best to simply display a js supported browser from the mp3 server. This allowed me to create a gnump3d theme with a js keyboard for searching for music using the stylus.
6) create user on mp3 server host with same name and passwd as client, follow these directions to allow ssh w/o password and xauth http://www.cs.umd.edu/~arun/misc/ssh.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Remote-X-Apps.html#s5
7) use script to ssh xmms to st1200 and add as plugin for audio files in browser
Here are some screenshots:
http://u.is-a-geek.org/~sol/muzak_1.png
http://u.is-a-geek.org/~sol/muzak_2.png
If there is any interest, I can post any/all configuration files & scripts.
