Poll : Your Operating System

[arturmeinild]

I hear Debian has far the best package management, way better than RPM... and Kernal compilation should be a breeze also...

[Seus Hawkins]

Currently XP but I'll be getting windows 2000 professional. Seems so much more stable and doesn't require much cpu.

Regards

[Seus Hawkins]

I wonder whether Beos or Linux is optimal if I where to switch to one of those. They can't run FL studio can they?

Regards

[BONES]

I originally chose to install Demudi after Fake's posting on how to get VST's running - that was the distro he used.
What would you recommend?

I have used SUSE, Red Hat [now Fedora] and Mandrake [which now has another name] and found them all pretty easy to work with. Of course, I actually wnet out and bought boxed copies so that I could read instructions but I managed to install Red Hat Enterprise 4 last week with no documentation or assistance from anyone. It just worked. I'd say SUSE if I had to choose.

I hear Debian has far the best package management, way better than RPM... and Kernal compilation should be a breeze also...

Yeah, Debian is supposed to be good for geeks in that respect but who is gonna compile their own kernel? RPM works just fine and SUSE has a real good packet Manager, I think its called YAST [Yet Another Set-up Tool]. Or maybe that's it's "Control Panel" analogue?

[tetraplan]

I originally chose to install Demudi after Fake's posting on how to get VST's running - that was the distro he used.
What would you recommend?

Maybe try Planet CCRMA? It's based on Fedora and not as hardk0re as DeMuDi. It has apt-get which is quite brilliant, and IIRC it uses a preemptible kernel rather then the realtime one used by AGNULA (which is said to be pretty flakey at times and seems to break stuff. Maybe that was your problem when you tried it).

You don't need to get all CDs by the way, most stuff can be installed through YUM or (preferably) apt-get. You'll find CCRMA here: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
I believe the FC3 based one is considered stable now, FC2 should work, too. FC4 is getting there but still unfinished.

I hear Debian has far the best package management, way better than RPM... and Kernal compilation should be a breeze also...

Yeah, Debian is supposed to be good for geeks in that respect but who is gonna compile their own kernel? RPM works just fine and SUSE has a real good packet Manager, I think its called YAST [Yet Another Set-up Tool]. Or maybe that's it's "Control Panel" analogue?

I'm not too fond of RPMs, but most distros have good package management nowadays.
Nothing beats Gentoo's Portage, though, except Gentoo is pretty deep
and...
can...
get...
very...
very...
very...
tedious.
And yes, YAST reminds me of Control Panel. Works pretty well, although I think SUSE is pretty bloated. Currently, Ubuntu is still my favourite, and it's much more flexible than it seems.

Everyone seems to come up with this kernel-hacking business, by the way, and I agree with BONES that this isn't necessary unless you feel like really customizing your system. The cases in which you have to recompile your kernel are getting increasingly rare.

To be honest, I've not really got much idea what I'm doing (or why!), and it honestly seems to me that Linux isn't much of a leap from Windows 3.1 - I'd love to be shown otherwise though.

Just read the online tutorials, there's tons of them. Maybe start with a distro just to learn what you're doing and why -Gentoo may take time to get stuff done, but you'll learn a lot- and then install a distro to make music with.
On the other hand, you could start with a commercial distro, too. Like BONES said, they tend to come with big manuals, and you get stuff like helpdesks (although I've found that online communities are a very helpful resource, too).

Linux has come a long way and modern distros are on par with most modern commercial OSes. The seperation of desktop and underlying OS may feel a bit weird at first, but OS X works in a similar way and that works very well, too.

Audio and Video are still pretty experimental, but now two of Our Favourite Devs are considering porting their programs, this may change, too. These are truly exciting times.

Groet, Erik

[james0tucson]

Yeah, Debian is supposed to be good for geeks in that respect but who is gonna compile their own kernel?

Answer: Every linux user who is the least bit serious about tuning. It's not a big job, or difficult to do, or even hard to understand. Not a big deal, with plenty of good reasons to do it.

[james0tucson]

Too bad it's radio buttons and not checkboxes.
I can't participate in the poll if I have to pick only one.

So you use all your OS's equally?

Just about. They have different roles so it's hard to answer a question like that. I probably use linux more
since all my communication and web usage and development work (including my paying day job) happens on linux. But my business runs on Solaris.

Of course my DAW is Windows XP, which might be the only thing relevant to the KVR poll. But I have an experimental linux box that I'm developing a custom music system on, and that gets a lot of my time.

So it's a tough question. Someone is sending me a Powerbook and a Mac Mini this month, so it gets even stranger. And next Spring I'm going to take a comp sci course on MIPS assembly language. I don't even know what hardware I'll be using then, but I'm sure I'll be putting in some hours on it.

[AD80]

Too bad it's radio buttons and not checkboxes.
I can't participate in the poll if I have to pick only one.

So you use all your OS's equally?

Just about. They have different roles so it's hard to answer a question like that. I probably use linux more
since all my communication and web usage and development work (including my paying day job) happens on linux. But my business runs on Solaris.

Of course my DAW is Windows XP, which might be the only thing relevant to the KVR poll. But I have an experimental linux box that I'm developing a custom music system on, and that gets a lot of my time.

So it's a tough question. Someone is sending me a Powerbook and a Mac Mini this month, so it gets even stranger. And next Spring I'm going to take a comp sci course on MIPS assembly language. I don't even know what hardware I'll be using then, but I'm sure I'll be putting in some hours on it.

That is way too much man haha. Pick one and run with it.

[james0tucson]

I've no idea - just dl'd the lastest Demudi and Debian distros, so I assume 2.6.

I'm surprised it didn't recognize your drive controller. SATA?

Some distributions have the installer on a different version than the one that gets installed.


This is a system where it really is important to know what hardware you have, and that's really the painful thing about being the person to install the system.
XFree setup and audio support are separate things that can also be a pain. None of this is really the fault of linux developers, or XFree86 developers, or ALSA developers, but it certainly can be a pain.

I end my linux advocacy by trying to convey the understanding that it's a very easy system to *use*, but that *installation* has a totally different set of circumstances. If one of the bootable-cd distros
doesn't work for you, it might be a struggle from there. On some hardware, it might not even be possible (some products are intentionally kept from having linux support!)

I hope I have never spread the idea that installation from scratch is "easy". It's sometimes not easy with *any* OS. I've lived through the hell of not having device drivers at install time with XP, and it's not any more pleasant.

[james0tucson]

That is way too much man haha. Pick one and run with it.

I doubt you fully appreciate the scope of my business, but thanks

Without Solaris, Foundry, Network Appliance, and EMC, I'd be toast. Without Linux, I'd have no skunkworks.
Without Windows, I'd lack certain compatability, primarily in the DAW, which is just a hobby anyway.

[AD80]

Heh, yeah I guess I'm just a simple music producer and need the OS that provides the best and widest variety of tools with the least hassle. XP.

[BONES]

Yeah, Debian is supposed to be good for geeks in that respect but who is gonna compile their own kernel?

Answer: Every linux user who is the least bit serious about tuning. It's not a big job, or difficult to do, or even hard to understand. Not a big deal, with plenty of good reasons to do it.

Which, if Linux were 100 times more popular, would be exactly the same total number of users it is now. Maybe if I wanted to run TOXIK on a Pentium 166 I might consider it for a minute or two but I think my current hardware is sufficently powerful that I sincerely doubt I would notice any difference.