[PlanetCCRMA] Planet Success! and a few new user caveats, from someone who just went through them.

[Matthew Allen]

     At the outset I would like to thank Fernando and everyone at Planet
CCRMA for making my switch to  linux a bit less painful than it could have
been. 

Background:
     I've been using PD on my Win2k machine for a little over a year (and
been doing audio in the computer realm for well over a decade). The Win
machine itself was starting to complain about its age, My wifes laptop was
refusing to install WinXP and a friend gave me an old thinkpad 770. So I
decided to do what any sane person would do, and jump headfirst into linux,
and switch all of the machines at the same time. 

     I decided to test on the laptops first using some of the great Live
CD's out there (ones I could install on the HD if I wanted, which sadly
excluded Dyne:Bolic). I ended up with straight Knoppix on the newer (1997)
laptop, a Knoppix-Based tweak called DamnSmallLinux on the older thinkpad,
and to install the Planet on the main sound box. Some pie in the sky ideas I
had were once the machines were up and running I would use a wirless netcard
on one of the laptops to connect to the CCRMA machine and do my sound design
remotley in the comfort of a nice cushy chair.

     2 weeks later it all seems to be working nicely.

Gotcha's for people who are completely new to linux and getting the planet
stuff up and running, with an off-line machine:

     These are the main things that held me up the last couple of weeks.
1. Using works fat pipe to download iso' is good.
2. Using WinXP's built in CD creator to make the cd's is useless (except to
transfer the data home). The built in WinXP cd creator makes its own image
with your image as data on it. This of course does not let you boot up with
the cd's because to the boot manager they look like normal data cd's (which
they are). www.burnatonce.com is a great small little app for burning iso's
and img's.
3. On the same note, if your cd writing software has no idea what an .img
file is just rename it to .iso and it will work (or at least it did for me)
4. USE CHECKSUMS! The 3 Install disks worked fine. My redhat updates and I
think my planet updates imgs were busted. I spent a good 2 nights trying to
figure out why apt-get was seg faulting. There are a bunch of little
checksum apps for win2k, spend the 20 minutes to download and check.
5. Add the redhat install cd's to your sources.list through apt-cdrom add. I
tried doing it with just the 2 planet CD's and got a bunch of errors (of
course).

     Once I figured this out The Planet install was nice and smooth.
Everything appears to be working well on my machine (athlon 1.1G, 512 Mb
ram, delta 4/10). Pd runs quite a bit better than it did under win2k, and I
am exploring the rest of the software slowly.

     Getting the Knoppix based laptops talking to the Planet Box was pretty
straight forward ( in the same way that getting the Planet installed was
straightforward. I'll write a little networking newbie gotcha list next
mail) once I figured out the whole crossover cable/hub thing.

     Once again thanks to the ccrma people for a great set of software and a
really nice install guide. I certainly would have been much less smooth
without it (and once I realized the html was on the CCRMA updates disk it
was super clear sailing).


matt.