[CM] question on audio distributions, CCRMA or Agnula, others?

[Chris Dawson]

Thanks so much for the input.  I suppose my next question is whether 
anyone has found serious version lagging, for lack of a better term, for 
important software packages with any type of distro.  One of the things 
I do dislike about Debian is that there is often a lag between when an 
app is distributed in package form and when that same app is initially 
released as a source tarball.  I generally prefer to build from source 
when possible, but for an app like Ardour which has many dependencies it 
is often so much easier to install via debian .deb packages or using 
gentoo's portage system.  The one great thing about Fedora-based systems 
is that the RPM maintainers generally are pretty quick to distribute 
RPMs when a new version comes out, which you cannot always say for 
Debian.  Obviously for common apps like gaim or firefox any distro will 
have very up to date packages, but a lot of the audio apps are cutting 
edge and not so widely used, and I wonder if anyone has had bad 
experiences getting something to work until it was released within the 
package system such that they would not recommend a distribution for 
that reason.

I hope this discussion is helpful for others and that I am not 
needlessly spamming the list with off topic questions.

Chris

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Rick Taube wrote:
>
>> I have the agnula distro (with fluxbox not gnome) running on a 
>> machine in my office. it was a snap to install and it has been very 
>> stable, i recommend it except for fluxbox itself. if i installed it 
>> again i'd use the gnome version.
>>
>> On Feb 28, 2005, at 7:04 PM, Chris Dawson wrote:
>>
>>> This is not directly related to CM, so if people wish to answer 
>>> offline, that is definitely acceptable.  I am about to install a new 
>>> distro on my desktop, and would like advice about which 
>>> audio-optimized distribution people are using.  I suspect CCRMA is 
>>> what most will recommend since it is developed IIRC by the same 
>>> people who do CM, but does anyone feel happy using Agnula, for 
>>> example, or audioslack?  I personally try to stay away from RedHat, 
>>> and though Fedora is better, I would definitely prefer a debian 
>>> based distro.  I'll prepare myself for the flames...
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Chris
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> linux hacker
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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> I tried AgNuLa briefly when it first came out. They used to have two 
> flavors, DeMuDi (Debian-based) and ReMuDi (Red Hat based) but they may 
> have dropped the Red Hat flavor. In any event, I'm not sure they have 
> packages for any of the CCRMA tools (like CM); you'd need to get 
> ".deb" packages from somewhere or build them from source. I have never 
> done anything with Audioslack.
>
> Most of my machines are running a mix of audio and other software; I 
> don't have one machine "dedicated" to audio. I have one that's running 
> Debian "sarge", one dual-booted Windows and Gentoo, one dual-booted 
> Fedora Core 3 and Gentoo, and one pure Gentoo. I haven't done much 
> with the Fedora Core 3 partition; I set that up just as a learning 
> tool for certification exams rather than as a serious workstation or 
> server. And the one that's running "sarge" is only running "sarge" 
> because the hard drive is a tad small for Gentoo, which caches all the 
> packages in source form, yielding a fairly large "/usr" directory.
>
> What I have seen of AgNuLa (the Debian flavor) is quite impressive. I 
> don't particularly like either Gnome or fluxbox, but KDE is too 
> heavyweight for some of the real-time work, and even if you don't load 
> Gnome, a lot of it gets installed anyway, because a number of packages 
> depend on big chunks of it. You can load anything in the Debian 
> repositories on a DeMuDi system. If I had a dedicated audio system, it 
> would be my distro of choice for that system.
>


-- 
linux hacker