[CM] what linux?

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 15:08 -0500, Juan I Reyes wrote:
> Everybody seems to be talking about distros (sorry I got so late to this
> discussion). But speaking on my behalf and I take it, for all the
> starry-eyed real-time composers, Kernel is a big issue here.
> 
> I am not su sure who else is taking the time on building real-time
> 'music' Kernels but Nando's CCRMA_RT Kernel does make a difference.

I think at this point all/most other important audio oriented distros or
add-ons have realtime kernels (64Studio, Ubuntu Studio, Gentoo's pro
audio overlay, Jacklab on SuSE, etc, etc). 

> Many Linux newcomers take for granted the Linux-Audio issue since many
> distros now have ALSA embedded. But ALSA is still on version 1.0.x and
> some pros complain about its reliability or as an industry standard. The
> ALSA-OSS discussion still continues without a winner.

I'm not so sure about this.
I think the winner is: ALSA

OSS has been deprecated. Some people bring it up in the lists every once
in a while, the discussion flares up for a while and then dies. 

Obviously ALSA has its share of problems but some people seem to be
forgetting the problems with OSS that made it possible/necessary for
ALSA to exist. 

To me it looks like something like PulseAudio will become the "standard
interface" for non-critical audio apps on the desktop, Jack will remain
the pro api and ALSA will just be what talks to the hardware. 

-- Fernando

> Things get even worse if you are using an IEEE-1394 firewire audio-midi
> interface (let me say, windoze is not much better), and although Jack is
> in a better position than ALSA, FreeBob (FFADO) is still kind of beta.
> 
> As for the above I should say I support PlanetCCRMA. Building packages
> and getting things working sometimes is fun but it takes time and
> patience. Linux tends to be not so generic, so that it can be customized
> to several user levels. PlanetCCRMA is one of those levels because of RT
> Kernels plus many of music, interface and DSP RPM packages that Nando
> continuously maintains. FTR, it is a plus time-saver. 
> 
> Not to mention, Fedora Music group is very close to PlanetCCRMA and many
> efforts which started as PlanetCCRMA packages, now have gone mainstream
> into F8 and probably F9.