After deciding to go with a laptop I already owned as a audio server, I pulled out the old PII 266Mhz Dell Latitide CPi.  Spent a few nights installing Puppy linux and trying to get audio working… then the Xircom PCMCIA network card started being flaky…
So I gave up, and tied everything again on a PIII500Mhz Dell Latitide CPx.
Everything worked. (after installing Puppy)
Network worked (and still does)
Audio works (got installed and working even off the LiveCD)
I was feeling accomplished. Next step was to get the internal sound (since I don’t have any external USB audio devices) card split left/right into 2 sound cards.
And last night, without much effort at all, I wrote up a asound.conf file which split the internal sound card into 2 sound devices, each outputting to the left and right channel respectively.
I was delighted! I didn’t think it would have been so easy.

As for players, my only 2 choices are Squeezeslave (current version of 0.6) and SoftSqueeze (current version is 3.3), since they can assign a unique MAC address to slimserver.
I started with squeezeslave, and it’s not running nicely. A few times it worked, other times it would peg the CPU to 100%…  But it’s such a small and efficient program… It’s a shame that it doesn’t work well enough and reliably enough for me.
So I tried my other choice: Softsqueeze. The catch here is that I need Java installed.
So after Java got installed (and taking up more HD space then the OS itself -87Mb for Java install) Softsqueeze ran without a problem.
Started, stopped, everything it working perfectly. I guess I’ll be using it.
Puppy linux takes up 18Megs of RAM to run (which is pretty unbelievable;wonder what it will use when I run it in headless mode) with the window manager up. One instance of Softsqueeze (v3.3) takes up 38Megs, which means 56MB usage
Two instances should be 94Megs, which is nicely under the 128Megs the laptop has.

I love it when things fall into place.