ok, I have a VIA C7 based system, small fanless 1GB, built on everything.

I want to use it as the mother of all MP3 players in my car.

CURRENTLY I have DSL installed.

Something about the VIA video drivers dont seem to allow any MDV based distro to work. however ANY UBU based distro works fine.

I want a SMALL fast distro that has a nice based MP3 player AND USB auto mount.

The USB is important because I dont think that I'll be able to put enough HD INSIDE the box to hold my MP3's (I have 128GB of speeches I want to carry, not to mention music), so I figure an external USB HD will be my b est route.

unfortunately DSL (the one I have) is running kernel 2.4

I'm nopt really married to ANY distro, I just need a light GUI (for the wife) and a good boot time.

GOS works great, but takes almost 3 minutes to boot

any suggestions?

I had to correct you here, it should read:



since Ubuntu only exists because of Debian, and if anything was based on Ubuntu, it would have been based on Debian since thats where it all originated

I'd suggest using a Debian-based distro since they seem to work fine for you. If the others aren't working, or taking too long to boot, that is what I would do. Then you can install bum or sysv-rc-conf to enable/disable the services you do/don't need to make things a little faster.

actually its ubu specific, because i tried debian, that wouldnt boot either.

HOWEVER

strangely enough I DID get a FRENCH version of MCNL to work GREAT!

unfortunately i dont speak french, so i have NO idea what version it is.

I LOVE mcnl too, I wish I knew enough to get it intoo english.

the interesting part is that TORONTO just reboots and reboots (as do all other MDV versions)

I never even get to anything, about 1/2 of 1 second AFTER I get the "boot from CD" message, it immediately reboots.

cant get to a cli or anything.

j

Have you tried any slackware based distros? There are several specifically designed for limited hardware like zenwalk, slax and vector. One that's getting a lot of favorable reviews is wolvix:

http://wolvix.org/

It's based on slax but customized with xfce instead of kde.

i hadnt tried it, but i will now

thanks for the suggestion!