Ha! Recipe:

Ingredients

• An old powerbook with a mostly broken screen and a very broken hinge (priceless).
• A long wire to the stereo (10$)
• A short wire the printer.
• Ethernet cable to the household hub.
• VNC.(free)
• Web Remote, lets you control iTunes over the web. (10$)

Instructions

• Plug in power adaptor
• Install OS10 from scratch, wiping disk clean.
• Plug into Ethernet
• Run short cable to printer
• Run long cable to stereo, considering selling CD player.
• Install VNC. So we can work on machine without leaving our chair.
• Enable print sharing, so we have a print server.
• Enable file sharing
• Copy all the music (mp3 etc.) into the household onto this machine.
• Load mp3 into iTunes
• Via iTunes preferences enable iTunes sharing, so we have a tune servers.
• Install Web Remote; have it start up at reboot.

When you done you can play your iTune’s library on the stereo; just like you’d bought an Airport Express. If the old powerbook has a airport card you can also let is act as a wireless base station.

I gather some people can get their powerbooks to keep running even when the lid is closed. That didn’t work, dependably, for me. (Did you know there is a magnet on the lid of most of the powerbooks; aligned with the mousepad?)

You can print from OS9 to an OS10 printer if you create on the OS9 machine a desktop printer that uses the right lpr server and queue.

I couldn’t get Darwin to run on an olde iMac; maybe later. I was doing something analogous on a FreeBSD box; but this was really easy.