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

[Dave Phillips]

Brian Dunn wrote:

>If your system works the way you want it too most of
>the time, i want to hear your opinion.
>  
>
Hi Brian:

  I have two machines I use for music (and everything else too). My 
laptop is a PII 366 HP Omnibook 4150, not a very powerful machine at 
all. It isn't suitable for serious audio work, so I mainly use it for 
writing and for some MIDI work. That machine is running Planet CCRMA Red 
Hat 9. Yes, it's an old system, but it performs flawlessly with apps 
such as seq24, QSynth, and Sequencer Plus (under DOSemu).

  My desktop box has two systems on its drives. Again, Planet CCRMA's 
RH9 runs on one, AGNULA/Demudi runs on the other. The RH9 systems use a 
2.4 kernel and are tuned according to Fernando's excellent instructions. 
However, I don't use many of the Planet C packages, I prefer to build 
the apps locally. And here's where the major problem with the system 
kicks in: If I want to build a newer package like, for example, Om, the 
default system components won't do the job. Alas, upgrading the major 
components like GTK, gtkmm, the KDE libs and the associated Qt build, 
all this turns rapidly into a nightmare. Thus, while Planet C's RH9 can 
claim excellent performance it's just not very easy to update to 
accommodate the newer stuff. On my laptop that's not much of an  issue, 
but it's a problem for the desktop machine if I want to test and report 
on the newer apps.

  Performance on the laptop under Planet C's FC3 was not so good, and 
I've been reluctant to try again with a more recent version of FC.

  My AGNULA/Demudi system is based around a 2.6 kernel. It also works 
quite nicely, and it has the advantage of being more up-to-date in its 
components. However, even that system is not as current as I'd like, and 
I still run into problems compiling programs that need the absolute 
latest versions of their dependencies.

  I'm fairly experienced with Linux, and I often consider building a 
system "from scratch", i.e., start with a distro that offers the very 
latest GTK2, Qt4, most recent KDE and GNOME libs, and so forth, then 
start building the apps I want to run. I used Slackware when I first 
started with Linux, maybe I'll return to it someday.

  Btw, you might like to know that my desktop machine is only an 800 MHz 
box, but Ardour, JAMin, ecasound, Rosegarden, Hydrogen, etc. all work 
beautifully on it, regardless of the underlying system. Linux rules, 
Linux audio developers rock. :)

  So there's my two ducats.

Best,

dp