Re: [microsound] Linux Distros for Audio? [Ubuntu]

[derek holzer <derek@xxxxxxx>]

I was a bit anti-Ubuntu for a while, the least of which was because of 
it's Bennetton-porno, politically-condescending cover art. But I had to 
do a bunch of very quick installs for a festival last week, and Ubuntu 
really saved my bacon, so a less superficial reevaluation was in order.

As I mentioned in the PPC thread, because Ubuntu is Debian-based, you 
can add some sources for regular "unstable/testing" Debian, and have a 
wealth of packages available, including a great majority of the apps in 
the Planet CCRMA collection, as well as a full suite of Pure Data 
externals. The installer for Ubuntu is actually much nicer than the one 
for DeMuDi, although you have to deal with some very strange 
idiosyncracies [like the way "root" is handled]. Still, for a 
single-user newbie who is not planning on running a production 
webserver, I would recommend using the Ubuntu installer and then adding 
apps from DeMuDi/Debian unstable.

I have some notes on the DeMuDi installer here:

http://umatic.nl/workshop/demudi_install.txt

You can add the same sources listed here to your /etc/apt/sources.list 
and pick up the lastest "testing" Debian packages. To get the DeMuDi 
packages, add this line:

deb http://apt.agnula.org/demudi testing main local extra

But for now I would be careful of the demudi-config package, and also 
take care with the multimedia-kernel package they offer, as I have not 
determined how compatible with the Ubuntu system it really is. Expect 
some testing results for x86 to appear on Umatic.nl within the next few 
weeks, as I am really curious how the whole combination will work out. 
[I teach workshops regularly on this stuff, so it's really my job to 
know...]

One big minus is that DeMuDi is still at the 2.4 kernel, which means 
that a lot of brand-new hardware [last year or so] will have 
sub-standard or no support. Ubuntu ships with 2.6 kernel, so it is much 
more suited to newer machines. Downside of the Ubuntu kernel is that it 
lacks [to my knowledge] the preemptive, low latency and 
user-mode-security patches which allow a properly-configured Linux box 
to soar in terms of audio performance. I'll try to figure out a 
workaround for this soon and get back to y'all.

more l8r,
d.

Gavin Stevens wrote:
> I recently installed Ubuntu Linux to compare against Debian (upon which
> Ubuntu is built). This new distro is growing on me quite quickly. The
> sound seems to work straight out of the box. I am currently installing
> some old favourites like Audacity & X-Wave.
>
> For simplicity (at least, that how it looks right now), Ubuntu could be
> worth a try.


--
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 36:
"Consult other sources
-promising
-unpromising"

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