[LAU] which lau distro is more commandline friendly?

[Len Ovens]

On Sun, 20 Dec 2015, Karen Lewellen wrote:

> At the same time I am  posting here, I am posting on the talk list of  a LUG 
> here in the greater Toronto Area.
> Two situations  that members have asked about, referenced   are bringing up a 
> couple of questions for me.
> of the popular   Linux distributions specifically developed for the 
> professional audio community,  which is more  likely to allow for command 
> line access?

>From the login window control alt F1 to F6 will bring up a terminal 
screen. All will also have the Xterm or something like it often with a 
keyboard shortcut to make it open. Rather than using mutiple VTs, I would 
suggest using dbus_launch to start a text based session manager such as 
screen and use that to switch from one terminal to another. That way 
jackdbus enabled commands can connect from one terminal to the next. I use 
screen for my login to my server where I can switch between this mail 
client (alpine) and irssi for IRC as well as a terminal for server 
maintenance (from within my LAN).

> My second question is tied to latency.  I believe this issue came up when I 
> first asked about outfitting a computer for Linux audio work.
> One person here tells me that there here are low latency kernel tools that 
> address the problem.  the question is going to be if those tools work with 
> older distributions, squeeze for example, because more up to date Kernels do 
> not always support hardware synthesizers.

Any kernel 2.6 and up can be made RT, from the early 3.* kernels there 
have been "lowlatency" versions that can work very well with no patching.

> so, I have a choice.  build Linux audio setup with zero chance to use the box 
> directly, seems most likely right now, and does not bother me very much since 
> the screen readers are rather dreadful, or build a setup with a slight door 
> open on that use the machine directly front.  I already know ssh telnet is

It is fully possible to start a session and using CTL/ALT/F1 get a 
terminal and either just log in or ssh user at localhost from the same 
machine. So far nobody has dropped VTs that I know of.


--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net