[linux-audio-user] Suitable distro for audio works: Debian Stable -> Unstable

[tim hall]

On Sunday 28 December 2003 21:18, derek holzer wrote:
> Just a quick note: trying to 'apt-get install demudi-all' over anything
> but Debian Woody will end in tears. 

Yes, you're right and this package is not available on all distributions 
either, so ignore that suggestion.

> My experience is that newer KDE
> packages, in particular, create a rat's-nest of dependencies which get
> quickly broken by down-grading to the needs of the DeMuDi packages,
> especially qjackctl and some of the midi ones that use QT. Afraid you'll
> have to choose between a fancy desktop and a full-on DeMuDi box for the
> time being...

Agreed.

I'm having a reasonable degree of succes with my mixed system on this. This 
is not a recommended strategy, by the way kids :-] I'm mostly running 
debian/testing with kde-3.1.4 and I've managed to install an awful lot of 
audio apps either from the Agnula-1.1 archive or Debian/Unstable on top of 
that. It's taken a fair amount of juggling and I've not really checked out 
how much of it Actually Works. The one critical unresolved dependency is with 
qjackconnect, which still depends on the old libqt-mt, qjackctl-0.0.9a-1 is 
fine. It does mean I'm not using some QT audio apps, I have both Rosegarden4 
and MusE installed. Downgrading to meet the needs of DeMuDi-1.0 would cause 
all sorts of problems. I do suspect that by the time I get it working it will 
be more 'unstable' than 'testing'. I'm working on the basis that all the 
packages I want will filter through into the testing archive sooner or later 
and I'll kind of meet them halfway. Agnula/DeMuDi-1.1 is based on a recent 
'snapshot' of unstable (aka 'sid') FTWDK.

While all of this is madly gay, It wouldn't do for every day, I really live 
on hda, the drive ... next .. door. Which incidentally is running 
Agnula/DeMuDi-1.0 on top of Woody and it all works fine [now :-] apart from 
some b0rked bits of kde2, which I can live without. For the first time user, 
start here, it's all rather old compared to what people are talking about on 
this list. I guess the point I'm making is the the apt system is flexible 
enough that you can integrate packages from other debian-based archives at 
any point simply by adding them to your /etc/apt/sources.list and also gives 
you a great deal of control over that by editing /etc/apt/preferences and 
using apt-pinning. You /do/ have to decide whether you want a DAW or an 
office box, however.

I've only been using Debian a year so I'm still a relative newbie and I find 
this pretty straightforward. It does require having a reasonable amount of 
time to spend reading and configuring. If you're not up for that, don't use 
Debian :-)

cheers

tim hall