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

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 17:28 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On 12/3/05, Brian Dunn <job17and9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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
> >
> 
> I have two opinions:
> 
> 1) If I want *exactly* what Fernando provides on the Planet site, no
> more and no less, then PlanetCCRMA is the best I know of. It's well
> supported in the audio area by a great guy. It has a good mailing list
> with helpful people. (Of which I hope I'm one once in awhile anyway.)
> Overall very positive, but it has two downsides:
> 
> a) If you need ANYTHING that's not part of the Planet apt system then
> be prepared for RPM hell. At least that's my experience. Email, DVD
> stuff, etc.

Hmmmm, I'd dare say this is a bit extreme :-)

I'm not saying this is easy, of course. 
I'm not saying that it is better or greater than other distros, either. 
I'm not saying that I can be objective :-) ;-) :-p

The ammount of work depends on what "anything" is. Anything that is in
Fedora Core should be easy (includes email I guess). Anything in other
apt/yum repositories is usually fine. If you want to build your own
packages from source you will need to install the required development
packages and maybe that is what you mean by "RPM hell[*]", but I imagine
that should be the case in other distros as well - unless they don't
make a separation between base and developer packages, perhaps that's
the case with gentoo. You may run into stumbling blocks if whatever you
are trying to build depends on newer versions of core packages than the
ones provided by the base distro, that can of course be a problem. 

YMMV...
-- Fernando

[*] usually "RPM Hell" was meant to describe the situation in which you
want to install an isolated package (an RPM in the case of rpm based
distros), and it requires another package you don't have, and after
finding it it requires another, and so on and so forth. This particular
situation is old history, these days you can use dependency resolvers
such as apt, yum or smart to resolve dependencies automatically for
you.