XT Software

paulmerchant · Post by **paulmerchant** » Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:27 pm

I'm wondering if EXT2 is being written in Free Pascal 2. And is the Lazarus IDE being used at all (even as nothing more than a GUI for managing code and interfacing with the compiler)? There's a new image editing application like PhotoShop called Pixel that was written in Free Pascal 2 and it is being compiled for Windows, Linux, Linspire, MacOSX, BeOS, Zeta, QNX, MorphOS, FreeBSD, eComStation, OS/2, SkyOS and DOS. Granted, Pixel only has pixels to worry about, but maybe EXT2 can be ported to Mac OSX, too.

djsubject · Post by **djsubject** » Mon Dec 12, 2005 6:46 pm

well i downloaded xfld live, bernt the disk, put it in my old celron pc 1.2 gig with 128mb of sd ram, booted presed enter then space bar (when asked during boot), then clicked the brouser icon, then i posted this post.

well thats the easy bit out the way

now its time to see if me & linux can get on with other

thanx for all the helpfull info & links in this thread

Subz

Radek · Post by **Radek** » Mon Dec 12, 2005 8:45 pm

fake wrote:Try a dedicated music distro!

DeMuDi = Debian Multimedia Distribution = latest low latency kernel and hard drive optimised by default, has Synaptic package manager and the latest software and drivers. You can also switch from the Gnome desktop to Fluxbox for a very low resource desktop.

@ jorgan:

Can you explain what you mean by "native linux vst's" as linux don't have vst support at all. It has it own LADSPA

Well... I'm not Jorgen but probably he means VSTs not depending on Win's API. The VST protocol itself is indepedent of system (Mac got VST too). Unfortunately many plugins are using some Win's call so to run them wine will be mandatory.

fake wrote: plugins which is a linux format not vst. You could compile ex2 to have dssi/fst and jack support which would then give you vst support through dssi/fst and wine.

Dll can be supported directly. The mplayer can run codecs from such files so it's not technically impossible.

fake wrote: It needs jack support for the routing capabilities or it will be pant's.
OSS is also old and has been abandoned in favour of Alsa/jack.

For a start this is better than no Linux eXT at all! Given past experiences eXT2 will be developing rapidly and Jorgen already stated that midi/audio layer of eXT2 will be open sourced.

glurgle · Post by **glurgle** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 1:30 am

indeed, I'm looking forward to it.

On the subject of window managers, and Linux vs. Windows performance. It's certainly possible to optimize windows and replace your default shell etc. much in the same way you would use a different window manager on Linux. For example I currently run a blackbox derivative for windows called bblean.

In the past I have also run liteshell, geoshell, and litestep. Of these, I find bblean to be the best balance between functionality, prettiness, and bloat. Runs lighter than explorer, has good skinning via bbLeanSkin and bbColorEx plugins, and is way more customizable than explorer. Liteshell is a definite second choice, it's very light weight, though pretty plain and not as extensible as using blackbox with plugins.

Coupling that with the various linux apps that are ported to windows (Vim, and the Gimp being my top two) and user friendly webserver packages like XAMPP from ApacheFriends.org, and there's less of a draw to use Linux for your average end-user.

I'm not in any way arguing against using Linux, but I think a lot windows users get tempted by promises of "more stable and efficient" when they'd have a much easier and rewarding experience customizing and tweaking their windows boxes for better performance and comfort. While Linux distributions are getting much much easier to install and use than they were, it's still often a traumatizing experience for many users to no longer have "my computer" and learn how to install software etc. etc.

Just my $0.02 etc.

telengard · Post by **telengard** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 1:57 am

pakana wrote:Are there any differencies in performance between Linux distros / window managers?

I'll be probably installing Ubuntu on my VAIO for starters, but I couldn't evaluate the performance when trying a live cd. Is linux faster for general use than Win XP?

Yep, as folks have mentioned there can be a big difference. I sometimes use gnome but I am a big fvwm fan. It is pretty full featured but is a lot more snappy. Just about any choice will be good on a modern machine though. Try them out, that's part of the fun of Linux, choices.

~telengard

futz · Post by **futz** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:50 am

Woohoo!!! I've been moving more and more to Linux during the past few months (mostly Fedora 4 and Ubuntu), and one of the biggest things I miss is music software. I know there is some stuff available already, but I've been unable to get most of it to work so far. Having XT there would be real nice.

jorgen · Post by **jorgen** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 10:55 am

Can you explain what you mean by "native linux vst's" as linux don't have vst support at all.

No OS has native support for VST's. VST doesnt have anything to do with the OS at all. VST is a set of functions/classes that can be compiled on any OS with C/C++ compiler (or translated to pascal). DirextX and AudioUnits are integrated with windows and OSX while VST is portable. Thats why I love VST/Steinberg

A native linux VST is a VST compiled for linux using the VST headers from Steinberg. A native windows VST is a VST compiled on and for windows. Linux can emulate a windows machine by using a programm called "wine" but you should get best performance without any emulation.

I'm wondering if EXT2 is being written in Free Pascal 2

Yes, I am. (FPC even works on gameboy Advance

) I dont use IDE or any 3rd party GUI toolkits. No gui dependencies on linux, its all pure xlib (with a few xlib extentions)

cheers
jorgen

undef · Post by **undef** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 12:34 pm

.... so is paulmerchant right in his assumption that a osX port would not be that difficult (yes i know that you never announced a mac-version of ext, jorgen, i'm just interested)

Z3R0T0N1N · Post by **Z3R0T0N1N** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:39 pm

jorgen wrote: I dont use IDE or any 3rd party GUI toolkits. No gui dependencies on linux, its all pure xlib (with a few xlib extentions)

cheers
jorgen

just have to say

SleepyP · Post by **SleepyP** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 11:15 pm

OSX is actually a Unix-derivative, so it shouldn't be extremely radically different from Linux i should think. i expect the biggest chunk of work there would be getting together the code to let ExT talk to the OSX audio system, which is a matter of putting together a DLL, right?

arke · Post by **arke** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:28 am

Doesn't anybody here use a _real_ Window Manager, like http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/?

BONES · Post by **BONES** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 8:28 am

That's ugly. I'll take WindowMaker over that any day.

arke · Post by **arke** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 8:43 am

I prefer the functionality. It's much better (in my opinion, at least) to have tabs and panes than windows ... especially working with the GIMP its much better.

Of course, WindowMaker isn't bad either, I used that before I found Ion

jorgen · Post by **jorgen** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 11:57 am

SleepyP wrote:OSX is actually a Unix-derivative, so it shouldn't be extremely radically different from Linux i should think. i expect the biggest chunk of work there would be getting together the code to let ExT talk to the OSX audio system, which is a matter of putting together a DLL, right?

window, mouse and keyboard handling is (very) different on linux and osx (X11/xlib versus carbon framework). but yes, the midi/audio part is just a matter of a shared libray file (.dylib)

cheers
jorgen

fake · Post by **fake** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 3:48 pm

Hi jorgen.

I'm using dssi-vst in wine, so....

If you ever need a beta tester for Linux.....

fake

XT Software

KVR Audio

Linux EXT?