[LAU] How to keep an updated "standard" linux audio system?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2017 12:52:05 -0300, Fede wrote:
>I used to try to keep my software as stable as possible by avoiding
>upgrades for as long as possible, but it ended up being troublesome,
>because then you have to compile your own libraries, and things tend
>to go out of hand when you want to receive bug fixes from later
>versions.
>
>My question is: How do you people keep an updated system stable? Do
>you wipe your drive clean and start over every ubuntu LTS release?
>
>If you are not on a debian based distro, how do you handle the lack of
>a kxstudio repo?

Hi,

in my experiences Arch Linux is the better distro for easily
maintaining audio packages. I've got both installed, Ubuntu (a tailored
install based on the server image) as well as Arch Linux [1].

I package a lot of software myself, but I'm carefully with upgrading
software during a production, IOW I usually keep up with upstream, but
not necessarily install already build software [2].

FWIW David Runge became an Arch Linux TU in October and already started
to maintain ill-kept audio packages provided by official Arch Linux
repositories. At the moment his packages are in the testing repo,
unfortunately I don't have time to help testing at the moment.

Apart from the official repository Arch provides the Arch User
Repository with lots of audio software and at least the IMO important
software is well maintained. Arch now has it's own audio mailing list
again, so others and I could help you to build packages. However, Arch
Linux is not a user-friendly distro, you need some Linux knowledge to
maintain an Arch Linux install.

There is no need for a third party repository as there is for Ubuntu,
since the distros have different policies. You e.g. can't get
linuxsampler by an official Ubuntu repository, regarding it's invalid
license. This isn't an issue for Arch Linux [3]. Linuxsampler is
provided by an official Arch repository.

Regards,
Ralf

[1]
[root at archlinux rocketmouse]# cat /etc/os-release 
NAME="Arch Linux"
PRETTY_NAME="Arch Linux"
ID=arch
ID_LIKE=archlinux
ANSI_COLOR="0;36"
HOME_URL="https://www.archlinux.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://bbs.archlinux.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.archlinux.org/"

[root at archlinux rocketmouse]# systemd-nspawn -qD /mnt/moonstudio lsb_release -a
LSB Version:	core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
Release:	16.04
Codename:	xenial

[2]
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ uname -rm
4.13.13-rt5-1-rt x86_64
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pacman -Q ardour5 jack2 x42-plugins 
ardour5 5.8-1
jack2 1.9.10.r293.gc44a220f-1
x42-plugins 20161230-1
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ ls -hAl /var/cache/aur/ | grep '\-rw'
-rw-r--r-- 1 rocketmouse rocketmouse 9.1M Sep 16 16:45 ardour-5.12-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
-rw-r--r-- 1 rocketmouse rocketmouse 932K May 27  2017 x42-plugins-20170428-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

[3]
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pacman -Qi linuxsampler | grep License
Licenses        : GPL  custom:exception