[LAU] Audio distros

david gnome at hawaii.rr.com
Sun Feb 17 06:50:39 UTC 2013


On 02/16/2013 08:35 PM, Simon Wise wrote:
> On 17/02/13 05:24, david wrote:
>
>> The way to handle updates on Sid: start with Aptosid. Update only
>> those apps
>> that you find you need to update. I use Rosegarden, and it had some
>> bug fixes
>> that addressed issues I had with it, and Debian Stable was never going
>> to get
>> the fixes. (Neither did backports, as far as I know, but when I was using
>> Stable, I found backports pretty useless.)
>
> I've used aptosid's ancestors that way since that same team made
> kannotix back when etch was sid ... but it seems that they may have
> gotten tired of it or something ... only one new release last year and
> very little other visible activity ... one of the core team (there are
> about a dozen that have been doing it together since 2006) has set up
> different version, but unfortunately it does not seem nearly so
> rigorous, even if it seems a lot more open, friendly and perhaps more
> active. So not sure about the future of that option. It has been a great
> not-really-a-distribution for a long time.

Aptosid's team has been through a lot of struggle, recuperating from the 
conflict with their former treasurer or something like that. They did 
some updates in January 2013, including VirtualBox (that's where I get 
it) so they're not completely dead.

>> FWIW, I'm running Sid on my two main systems (desktop and laptop). I
>> also have
>> deb-multimedia in the repository collection, along with a couple of
>> PPAs such as
>> one for the real cdrecord.
>
> The deb-multimedia stuff is much less needed than it was a few years
> ago, and it can certainly bite you with incompatibilities ... esp on
> sid, their libraries are not always binary compatible but they will be
> the ones installed on your system (if you don't pin stuff or actively
> manage what gets brought in from the repository). They version them as
> more recent than the debian ones for this reason, but unfortunately the
> other debian audio apps that they don't package sometimes get broken by
> this, since they are built against the debian libraries.

Hmm, last time I checked, none of the deb-multimedia versions were set 
to be more recent than the Sid ones. They're also not automatically 
upgradeable, apparently. At least, last time I did a system upgrade (not 
dist-upgrade) it didn't upgrade any of the deb-multimedia packages, even 
though some of them had been upgraded by deb-multimedia. At least I have 
to manually upgrade one if I want to.

I mostly use it for the win32 codecs, AACS keys, easytag, mplayer.

> Of course without something from outside you will be missing some things
> that debian still finds un-redistributable (even after relaxing their
> approach on software patents and allowing a lot more codecs in).
> Probably best to just fetch a couple of apps from the repository and
> install them directly rather than enable the whole repository.

I don't always agree with Debian's personal idiocies, such as their 
hatred of cdrecord. I replaced wodim with cdrecord, and was surprised to 
find out that CD burning WORKED ON MY LAPTOP AGAIN. Wodim had been 
failing with "hardware" errors for a few years before that.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://clanjones.org/david/
http://dancing-treefrog.deviantart.com/


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