[CM] what linux?

[Ralf Mattes]

On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 15:08 -0500, Juan I Reyes wrote:
> Hi Rick,
> 
> Everybody seems to be talking about distros (sorry I got so late to this
> discussion).

well, yes. Wasn't that actually thew question.

>  But speaking on my behalf and I take it, for all the
> starry-eyed real-time composers, Kernel is a big issue here.

Indeed - not only for realtime composers (whatever that might be :-)

> 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.

Errm, sorry, but a _lot_ do. JackLab (http://jacklab.net/), 
64studio (http://www.64studio.com), UbuntuStudio (http://ubuntustudio.org/),
even our (Freiburg University of Music) homegrown Frankenbuntu distro does it.
There are well-supported realtime/low-latency kernels for (at least) Fedora, SuSE,
Ubuntu and SlackWare available. So it's mostly about integration and _that_ is where
distributions are important.
 

> Many Linux newcomers take for granted the Linux-Audio issue since many
> distros now have ALSA embedded.

Many? Which hasn't?

>  But ALSA is still on version 1.0.x and
> some pros complain about its reliability or as an industry standard.

This sentence no grammar. :-) 
But ALSA actually is at 1.0.16 - so we are in release 16 (!) after the
first official stable release. The AutoCAD equivalent would probably be 
Alsa20, or maybe you prefer ALSA2009. Don't be fooled by conservative 
software versioning. 

>  The
> ALSA-OSS discussion still continues without a winner.

What? What "pro" is seriously using OSS? And who is discussing ALSA vs.
OSS. "Realtime Composing" with OSS.  

There are "issues" in the Linux sound world but they are mostly a
reasult of conflicting interests between us sound users and the (often
paid) kernel developers whose main goal often is disk/IO throughput and 
fair process scheduling. Nothing to blame ALSA (or OSS) for.


> Things get even worse if you are using an IEEE-1394 firewire audio-midi
> interface (let me say, windoze is not much better),

So, what do you want to say? 

>  and although Jack is
> in a better position than ALSA,

... because it's already at version 0.109.2 ... 
In my very personal experience ALSA is much more stable than jack, but
that's probably hard to gerneralize.

>  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.

Yes, but, short of dwelling in fanboy contry, could you elaborate on
where PlanetCCRMA is different/better than the "other" Media-centered
distros. 

 Cheers, Ralf Mattes
  
>   --* Juan Reyes
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Cmdist mailing list
> Cmdist@ccrma.stanford.edu
> http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/cmdist