I think Tim is a Mac Man.
Hold on ... were those old 1998 bulgy blue-bubble computers IMACS or EMACS? I'm pretty sure Im thinking of the wrong device.
As far as software, if you are not comfortable using a command line then open source operating systems may not be for you. You will wind up needing command line to install the things that you want.
As far as hardware , don't torture yourself with anything that has less than 4 meg RAM its not worth it and its likely the software you want will not work.
From Skywave: "...don't torture yourself with anything that has less than 4 meg RAM"
Hope you mean 4 GB RAM. A four-megger is basically a 386.
i typically use an xp or win7 netbook running winamp and sound solutions plugin. sound solutions takes a while to tweak but when done right, can bring dull flat sounding oldies to life. this of course is only good if your using you station as a wireless jukebox.
Meh, if its Windows XP you can get away with 512 MB. If you are running Win 98 SE, 128 MB does just fine. (Assuming you are using Zara Radio)
If you want to try to work with open source stuff for your radio station, the $35 raspberry pi is a pretty good way to go. I used them as an link back when I was on commercial radio, and when I get my part15 on the air, it's going to be driven by a raspberry pi 3.
Previously, I might have opted against a pi and instead gone with an atom board, but the 3 version has wifi onboard and has a quad core 64-bit CPU with enough horsepower to run things like jack.
You'll need a good USB power supply and a decent microsd card for storage, but if you can get going with the raspberry pi, you're doing pretty well as far as command line goes.
Airtime is pretty nice, but it's not quite what I need. The engine that it runs on, liquidsoap, is really, really nice if you can figure out it's scripting language. Once I get started, I might document what I'm doing.
Edit: Oh yeah, if you go the pi route, keep in mind that it's just a board. You can get cheap enclosures for it, and it needs an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse if you want to use it. Also, sound output is crap and it doesn't have input at all. The nicest cheap USB sound card that I've found is the "diamond sound tube." It looks a bit like a vacuum tube, but it has stereo in and out, unlike most cheap USB sound cards I've found. And the output is comparatively nice.
I just installed Ubuntu on an Intel Dual Core 2 Quad PC. Did a partition on the hard drive so I can keep the Win XP. Using Firefox to log onto this forum under Ubunto and it is working well. I'm guessing the learning curve will be getting programs like Zara, etc. to run on it.
Ubuntu is working well. I ran "Wine" in Ubuntu and got Zara Radio to run. I don't have speakers hooked up yet so I don't know if it outputs sound yet.
Thus far I'm finding that Zara Radio crashes under Ubuntu/Xubuntu.
Will try Radio DJ.
It would be real nice if this worked out. If it doesn't I'll have to lay out cash for a Win machine.