[linux-audio-user] Distros these days? What a mess!

lanas lanas at securenet.net
Fri Sep 22 17:45:31 EDT 2006


On Fri, 22 Sep 2006 11:25:00 -0700
iainduncan at telus.net écrivait:

> the major distros a total mess right now? Fedora core 5 seems to
> require MUCH tweaking to get any audio working and has a lot of alsa
> weirdness preventing serious work

I went through the process recently and wrote a bit about it.  Bought
hardware (M-Audio 1010LT, M-Audio Pulsar mic, M-Audio Axiom 25
keyboard, M-Audio DX4 speakers - hey. the corner store just got the
M-Audio line recently and that's all they have for serious audio).  All
that on top of a MSI Neo4 K8N, AMD dual core, 4GB RAM, a few disks.

Next step was the distro.  I use SuSE since a year and a half but was
building/using Linux From Scratch for the past four years, at home and
at work.  I couldn't get Jacklab on SuSE, so I started to look
elsewhere and settled for CCRMA (32 bits only) and also Studio 64.

CCRMA works just fine right from the start, after installing Fedora
Core 5.  Instructions to install CCRMA are clear, with examples, and
straightforward to follow.  The choice of packages has quite a lot and
RFedora provides the required system tools for
development/compilation.  The only let down is that it's only 32 bits.
But apart from that, the ratio fun/problem tweaking is very, very low
(apart from learning how the apps actually work ! which most of them
are easy to get basic fun).

Studio 64 works also right from the start but I don't have the
impression that the development tools are there and, it looks like a
very straight 64 bit system in that a compiled emacs will run in a
terminal window because it did not find X).

Back to SuSE 10.0, I find the 'Nerd 3' instructions to install Jacklab
not that clear, especially regarding installing the real-time version of
the kernel.  And, as shipped, SuSE 10.0 will let bundled audio apps
(jack, hydrogen, zyn, etc...) only run as root.  Surely that's not much
to fix, but the total outlook does not seem too well for someone who
does not have that much time to spend on fixing stuff.  So that's on
the backburner until Jacklab evolves a bit.

I'm surprised that Fedora 5 / CCRMA does not work for you since you
also have a M-Audio card.

Cheers.
Al



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