I have an old machine laying around the house that I would like to put to use as I gradually build a new system.

The specs:
PIII, I think 733mhz
256mb 133 RAM
AX63 Pro Motherboard
Diamond Multimedia Viper II Z200 Graphics Card (32mb ram, 125mhz)
20gb hard drive

I don't need the system to record anything or playback HDTV. I would like to just use it to play dvds and content (video-music) stored elsewhere on the network.

Is knoppmyth what I'm looking for and will this be possible?
Could I possibly buy a hauppauge card and put another hard drive in the machine and get fully up and running?

Music will be good, DVD's are just a little harder. Good news, your Z200 has hardware DVD decoding, so if the driver supports it you're good, otherwise. The CPU should be able to handle decoding DVD on its own, but I'm not as certain.

You said no TV, but you should be able to handle a card that does SD encoding directly to MPEG-2. (PVR-150 and similar) I'm pretty sure you can't handle a framebuffer card, they make the CPU encode.

Give KM a try. -- worst case; you lose is a little time and a blank CD.

P.S. One more thing, certain laws prevent and Free OSs like linux from including software for accessing content on commercial DVDs protected by the Content Scrambling System (CSS). Forum search will be your friend in crossing that bridge. "Pineapple" would be a good search term to try, But I've already said too much...

ok excellent, so i'm going to get started and see what happens. i wanted to make sure i at least had a chance of success before beginning the project.

i'm presuming the most recent distro is fine?

thanks for the response!

You're welcome. And welcome to the forum. I added a PS to my last post after you replied. Sorry it reads like a hazing stunt, you'll understand when you do some searching...

understood, thanks again.