[linux-audio-user] MDK audio distro survey

Austin Acton aacton at YorkU.CA
Wed Jan 29 20:43:00 EST 2003


On Wed, 2003-01-29 at 19:52, tim wrote:
> I do however find a lack of documentation relating
> to the Mandrake distro that is not aimed at noobs.

Really?  Could you be more specific about what you are looking for?

> This is true of the Mandrake site and also of the mailing
> lists and newsgroups i have come across, but maybe i have
> just missed something? Where do knoledgable Mandrake peeps
> hang out?

Most anyone using cooker (the semi-unstable version) hangs out on the
cooker mailing list (http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/flists.php3).  This
is a great place to report bugs, make suggestions, make friends, and get
hundreds of emails a day, but not a good place to ask simple support
questions.

The rest hang out on www.mandrakeclub.com (the forums are free to
access, some other stuff like proprietary rpms requires a membership). 
www.mandrakeforum.com used to be popular, but I think we are scrapping
it soon cuz mandrakeclub is so much better.

> Eg if i try to install an rpm which fails, what do i do?

Assuming you are using urpmi, this shouldn't happen.
$ man urpmi
is a good start.
If it's a non-Mandrake RPM, you may or may not get automatic dependency
resolution though.

> Rpms dont have much documentation relating to the rpm itself.

What documentation are you looking for?
$ rpm -qp --requires <name.rpm>
will list the required libraries of an rpm file.
$ rpm -qd <name>
will list all the documentation files' locations of an installed
package.

> -developers dont as a rule use Mandrake, and i have big
> problems installing immature software from source (and has already
> been said, most music production software is in a continuous state
> of flux right now, and i'm not sure you will ever be able to keep
> the rpms up to date.) I havnt been making SRPMS like you suggest,
> so i will give that a go.

I will try to keep them up to date.  We do pretty well at that
actually.  Cooker is usually running the same versions as gentoo, and
you can usually rebuild cooker apps for your box if you want to.

I do lotsa multitrack recording so it's in my best interest to keep
things current.  Usually I use audacity, but tkeca looks cool so maybe
I'll try it soon.

Austin

-- 
                        Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc.
             Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant
           Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto
             MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com)
                     homepage: www.groundstate.ca




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