[linux-audio-user] The best distro for music creation

[Cesare Marilungo]

Brian Dunn wrote:

>The possibility of using and contributing to studio
>quality audio software is really what first sparked my
>interest in linux.  So I installed Mandrake 10.1,
>because someone gave it to me and it sounded cool. 
>Since then i've had a lot of fun with it, using their
>mm kernel and running jack with seq24 and trying to
>come up with something cool enough to use ardour for,
>and everything ran relatively reliably.  BUT...  The
>lan componets of the distro simply don't work, the USB
>plug and play is more like
>plug-and-if-i-feel-like-it-play, and the printer
>suport is also compleatly unreliable.  So, just use
>mandrake for when i'm feeling musical and reboot to
>Micro$oft whenever i need to do anything else, right?
>well, that's getting old.
>So i took a friends advice and started playing with
>gentoo.  After all, it's well documented. and it was
>fun writing all those config files and oh so neat to
>DIY, but then i tried to install Gnome, and after like
>a 7 hour compile that i can't yet figure out how to
>use i'm thinking, what have i gotten myself into...
>
>So does anybody out there have the best of all worlds?
>good free documentation, reliable hardware support,
>binary packaging, a fast audio kernel, and config
>files that don't get re-written by some user friendly
>script somewhere that would be oh so convinient except
>for the whole doesn't work thing?
>
>If your system works the way you want it too most of
>the time, i want to hear your opinion.
>
>gratefull,
>Brian
>
>
>  
>
Just try Slackware. Things will not work out of the box, but you'll 
learn the basics of gnu/Linux and you'll have a stable and clean system, 
without the need to compile everything from scratch (as with Gentoo).
I run Slackware 10.2 with kernel 2.6.13 (compiled by myself with just 
the stuff I need) and the realtime-lsm module. My pc works the way I 
want most of the time, more than how it used to be with a closed source 
commercial operation system.

I guess there are a lot of better distributions out there. My only 
advice is to avoid a distro that does everything for you. These are the 
most difficult to configure and tweak if something doesn't work 
plug-and-play, and less adherent to standards. And you'll learn nothing.

c.