[LAU] Ubuntu Studio

[R Dicaire]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Daniel Jones <lawson.jones at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello List,
>   I am relatively new to Linux audio and am trying to decide on a
> distribution to use. I've been playing around with Fedora and the Planet
> CCRMA packages, but I am also interested in trying out Ubuntu Studio. I
> already have Ubuntu 7.10 on this machine, and I was wondering if I really
> need to go through the bother of creating a new partition and installing
> Ubuntu Studio from scratch, so to speak (not that it's such a terribly
> onerous task, but...). If I do a simple aptitude search for "ubuntustudio"
> while booted in Ubuntu a slew of packages come up (ubuntustudio-audio,
> ubuntustudio-audio-plugins, etc.). Is there any practical difference between
> simply installing these packages on my existing Ubuntu installation on the
> one hand, or going to the Ubuntu Studio website, downloading the image, and
> installing from there on the other? It seems as if the result would be the
> same in the end, but I'm not entirely sure. Thanks!

Simply installing the meta packages ubuntustudio-audio* should suffice.

There's a caveat with Ubuntu (and derivs like Studio) and jack though:
the jack pcm plugin for alsa is not included. You can get this enabled
by rebuilding the appropriate pkg (libasound2-plugins) though.

My personal opinion on this is that's a flaw in the design of the
distro. I'm sure the Ubuntu maintainers have their reasons, but the
Studio derivs also not enabling it tells me its not as good as it
could be.

If you don't have a  need for that pcm plugin, or are willing to
rebuild libasound2-plugins pkg to include it, by all means, check the
distro out. I liked it for most of the things I used it for, until I
came across the jack pcm plugin limitation.

Oh, under Ubuntu Gutsy, if you rebuild libasound2-plugins to include
jack pcm, there's a bug in alsa (assertion failure or similar) that
crashes the thread or app trying to use jack pcm plugin. Seems to be
an issue with resampling.

After trying all this on the above, I simply went to Debian testing
(lenny, which Ubuntu is based on). They include the jack pcm plugin,
and alsa doesnt exhibit the assertion failure I experienced under
Gutsy.

My understanding, though untested, is that alsa bug is fixed in
Ubuntu's upcoming Hardy Heron release, but Hardy still doesnt include
the jack pcm plugin by default.

Hope that helps....

-- 
aRDy Music and Rick Dicaire present:
http://www.ardynet.com
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