[LAU] Simple monitor system: which distro?

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Andrew Bryant's message of 2010-07-30 09:11:38 +0200:
> I want to build a system that monitors several audio signals.  It will 
> need to run:
> 
> alsa
> jackd
> meterbridge (3 stereo pairs)
> alsaplayer
> silentjack (3 instances)
> 
> There will be three soundcards.
> 
> Synchronicity and realtime are not important.  Long-term stability (i.e. 
> running 24/7) is.
> 
> Silentjack will need to run scripts that send emails in the event of 
> prog failures
> 
> It will need to boot into a script that starts all the above.
> It will not need a desktop - a straightforward windowmanager like fvwm 
> is sufficient.
> 
> It would be nice if it ran on elderly hardware - a PIII/733 with 512MB 
> is available.
> 
> I am expecting to modify meterbridge, so the existence of a binary 
> package is not important for that application.  The others, however, 
> will be standard.
> 
> Any thoughts which distribution would be the best starting point?
> 
> Andrew.

Any that gives you a minimal system to start with. I guess there are
many choices. The distro I use, Arch Linux, installs no alsa, X or
anything by default, you can add all that later. Meterbridge is
available as a script that builds the package from source [1] (and so is
jmeters, case that helps). Silentjack isn't in any repo, but it's
relatively easy to write a script that builds a package for you.

[1] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/meterbridge/meterbridge/PKGBUILD

Maybe look at something like gentoo, I guess it starts out minimal as
well. A distro specifically for older hardware might be a good idea too.
-- 
Philipp

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