[LAU] Gentoo as a DAW platform

Brent Busby brent at keycorner.org
Sat May 9 20:00:08 EDT 2009


Since there's been some discussion recently about questionable choices 
from the distros about the way they build multimedia apps that people 
depend on, sometimes building large numbers of packages against problem 
libraries that can't just easily be swapped out and corrected, what is 
the prevalent opinion about Gentoo?  Does anyone here have any comments 
about getting actual work done on a Gentoo workstation?

I should say while asking this that I have done source based upgrades of 
the base OS and package system on FreeBSD for a long time, so I'm not 
unfamiliar with some of the ups and downs of this approach (days of 
compiling, packages that never really do quite integrate together, 
etc.).  But FreeBSD isn't a very good multimedia OS, partially due to 
limitations in the kernel, which was made for TCP/IP, not for low 
latency.

Should I have my head examined for even thinking of depending on Gentoo 
for a DAW workstation (which will also do some video editing and perhaps 
gaming on the side)?  Or would this be an effective way to avoid all the 
distro politics and have my binaries compiled from nearly vanilla 
upstream and linked to whatever libraries I darned well want them to be?

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky



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