[linux-audio-user] Installing Demudi packages on Debian

[tim hall]

On Saturday 04 February 2006 17:29, Brent Busby was like:
> It's occured to me that installing the kernel from Demudi stable on
> Debian might be a nice easy way to get all my kernel tweaks without even
> needing to recompile.  And thanks to the way the kernel and the userland
> in Linux are so relatively version independant of one another (something
> not so true on other UNIX flavors), that should be quite safe, too.
>
> It made me wonder though -- since Demudi is built from Debian, what
> would be the issues with inporting lots of other packages useful to
> musicians as well, while still keeping the system essentially Debian?

DeMuDi tweaks affect mostly the audio side of things. A/DeMuDi-1.2.1 includes 
Xorg, but is completely compatible with sarge. A/DeMuDi-1.3 is roughly 
compatible with etch, but there are some areas that lack integration - KDE 
comes to mind.

> Do a lot ("a lot" meaning a destabilizing amount) of non-music-related
> packages from Debian get superceded by Demudi versions when you add the
> Demudi Apt repositories to the sources.list of a sarge machine?  Are any
> of you currently doing something like that?  Just wondering... 

I have been running A/DeMuDi-1.2.1 on top of sarge for well over a year now, 
I'm very happy with it. Basic instructions here: 
http://demudi.agnula.org/wiki/InstallApt
also check:
http://demudi.agnula.org/wiki/DocumentsFaq

It's useful to set /etc/apt/preferences to prefer DeMuDi packages over Debian 
sarge. If you're using synaptic you can set this in the preferences dialog 
once you have updated against the new /etc/apt/sources.list.

The DeMuDi packages only relate to multimedia (including Xorg), so you'll find 
most applications will stay the same. The apt system is pretty clever and 
you're likely to find that all applications will be useable if you stick to 
the stable repositories.

> I'm sure 
> that even as there have been many MIDI and recording apps in sarge that
> surely would not have gotten there without Demudi, there are probably
> still others that either never made it or have newer versions in Demudi
> than what sarge gives you.

:)

> I just don't want to make my system unmaintainable by mixing
> distributions like that on a really massive scale though...  Once you
> get newer versions of really critical things, it can be almost like
> committing yourself to running sid/unstable -- no easy way back.

If your system becomes unmaintainable from doing this using sources marked 
'stable' that would be considered a bug. If you should need further help, 
you'll probably find the AGNULA user forum <users at lists.agnula.org> friendly 
and useful. Let us know how you get on.
-- 
cheers,

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim