re: easy linux stuff, for the upcoming XT2 :)

[Z3R0T0N1N]

hi kids!

just some info for you, in case you are Linux-Curious; These are distro's that work right out of the box on my 1 year old laptop; and my system is really hard to please where linux is concerned, so i figure these were worth pointing out.

64Studio: Audio / multimedia distro, based on Debian Pure 64; this is fantastic, and because it's debian based, you get APT (synaptic) so installs and dependencies are a breeze. Highly recomended! BUT, not if you have an ATI chipset / graphics. If, like me, you do, you will have to boot to a command line, and do all sorts of nonsense, so move to the next one if you don't want to mess with it.
note - 0bviously you need an Athlon64 cpu for this.

Suse 10 (opensuse): NICE! This is one of the slickest distro's out there. Super userfriendly, very attractive visually (thanx to KDE3, among other things) and vastly improved (since i last tried it) YaST package / installation / system manager. It is brilliant. Feed it a bunch of the numerous third party package repository addresses, and it is at least as good as APT. Yast does a whole bunch of other things; it is an excellent and really user-friendly way to manage your whole system. No command line stuff at all is necessary with Suse10 :D:D
And, there is a 64 bit version too; I never knew just how f-ing fast my system was until i installed SuSE 10 amd64!!! Lightening broke a sweat trying to keep up
If you are a newbie, this is THE SYSTEM to start with, IMHO.
cons: Ardour is not installed by default, but I have had no problems installing Muse, Rosegarden, Audacity, Hydrogen, ZynaddsubFX, DSSI, and a bunch of others. Also, Kernel is not pre-patched, but i didn't bother; playing synths with my MIDI keyboard (Oxygen8 - which it automatically recognized, BTW ) there was no noticable latency; it felt like playing a hardware synth.

Musix GNU+Linux:(this one was mentioned quite a while ago by someone here; Thank you for the great tip, whoever that was!
This is (IMHO) the best 'out of the box' system for musicians yet; Based on knoppix, you can test the live CD version to see how you like it.
It has everything you will need to make music in a variety of ways, and everythign works straight away!!! for those who have fumbled their way through a couple of Linux installations, you will know what i added three exclamation points to that
Musix is what i have installed now; I would have liked to keep SuSe, but Musix was just a bit more up my alley, because of all the perfectly installed and configured music stuff. Even has three different trackers!
Oh, and Ardour too. And Rosegarden. And.... just more stuff than you can imagine. And it uses APT, so getting new apps should be a breeze. I haven't needed to yet

Anyway, I really hope this helps. I have had a LOT of trial and error stuff with Linux - i have never been particularly technically adept when it comes to Linux; more of a fumbling dim-wit, really So, when i found these three worked easily, with no mess, easy as Windows... well, i had to share, for the good of other hopelessly right-brained people like myself.

cheers all.
Here's to eXT on GNU/Linux!!!
-gabriel

[stefancrs]

What about Ubuntu?

Seems quite nice to me, but I'm not a linux user. Atleast not to this day.

[Hovmod]

Ubuntu was easy to set up, but it took a LOT of extra tweaking to get the music stuff right. This place helps a lot, but as you can see it takes a bit of work to set it all up right.

I couldn't get my Midiman Midi-USB adapter OR my PODXT to work after weeks of struggling, so I haven't booted in Ubunto for months. Those 45 GB I set off for a Linux partition are looking awfully tempting now. I've even started up Partition Magic a couple of times, but I don't dare just yet in case the dual boot utility gets f**ked.

I'll wait until my next computer arrives (probably like February or something) to bother with this. XT2 should be in the early stages of Beta testing by then, don't you think?

[loomchild]

Stefan, you should have a look to "Fake" and "Tetraplan"'s posts in the following thread: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=134344

[stefancrs]

To be honest, I'm quite happy with XP at the moment. I'm sometimes thinking about linux (and OpenBeOS/YellowTab's Zeta), because I'm so unsure of what will happen when Vista comes. But I'm in no way close to making a switch atm.

[D-Fusion]

Elive is also excellent (everything is already set up Alsa/Jack + it also has some synths)
http://www.elivecd.org/

[mikejade]

The only things still keeping me on Windows XP are Energy XT and latency issues. If this can be solved for Linux, I'm off baby! Soooo off!

[WoJ]

If energyXT can be run on linux as its 'own' GUI - and if it has some basic audio functions like reverse + export to mp3 - that'll be me sorted!

WoJ

[Radek]

The new Ubuntu6 "Dapper" is really great. I was making some music in Rosergarden in it (still waiting for EXT2!).

The installation process is... more than brilliant. System reaction is faster than in Ubuntu 5.1. It's a Linux of course so sometimes it might need some manual customization. But every OSes sometimes do but at least with Linux it had be done just once - right.

The only downside is music companies (both hard and soft) aren't exactly supporting Linux as common platform. The EXT2 will be one of the first. I cann't wait...

For anyone what would like to test some Linux distros why don't you try "LiveCD" versions? The Ubuntu6 can boot from CD and even install to hdd from that point.

The other thing what was impressing me immensely was that when a new kernel showed the older ones were still preserved and could be chosen at the boot up. And making partition image to eventual quick and easy system rescue needs just cat shell command (I put a gzip in a pipeline to compress it on the fly too).

If energyXT can be run on linux as its 'own' GUI - and if it has some basic audio functions like reverse + export to mp3 - that'll be me sorted!

WoJ

Jorgen said that EXT2 will be using X11 server directly and ALSA/OSS for audio/midi. It should run without any windows manager.

With built in sampler, synth (is that right?), many midi comps and quite nice files/samples manager the EXT2 is looking like selfcontained audio/midi workstation.

There are ways to run some Win VST in Linux as well but imho EXT2 should be quite usable on its own.

[jens]

dyne:bolic 2.0 has just been released!


http://www.dynebolic.org/

[WoJ]

"Jorgen said that EXT2 will be using X11 server directly and ALSA/OSS for audio/midi. It should run without any windows manager."

Yup, thats what I meant.

WoJ

[jens]

I use Apodio b.t.w (audio-centered Mandriva derivate) which works great out of the box (apart from aproblem with the Nvidia-drivers - but it is easy to get around iit once you realized what is going on - if someone needs help just ask.

http://www.apo33.org/apodio/doku.php

[jens]

Elive is also excellent (everything is already set up Alsa/Jack + it also has some synths)
http://www.elivecd.org/

can't recommend it (e.g. didn't manage to get my Echo Mia working - Alsa is only set up for standard consumer soundcards)

[Amberience]

XP is pretty much good enough to be honest. It would have to be really special to get me to use Linux, and even then I use a lot of programs that aren't Linux compatible, so I would probably still keep XP.

[jens]

XP is pretty much good enough to be honest. It would have to be really special to get me to use Linux, and even then I use a lot of programs that aren't Linux compatible, so I would probably still keep XP.

whatever some of the Linux fans might say: XP (=Windows NT) is very good for audio - it is a very modern os (much more modern than Linux actually which is still based on ancient Unix standards)...

but there are some problems:

- it is owned by one of the worst companies of the planet

- you can't be sure what direction it will take in the future though the signs look pretty bad


- you don't get most of the great open source for it while an equivalent doesn't exist... (e.g. Hydrogen, JAMin, Ardour, Xara Extreme, Kyliux, etc.)


- there's currently no Jack for Windows