22 Sep
2006
22 Sep
'06
4:49 p.m.
I've been pretty disappointed at the state of the
various linux distros
recently, and ended up settling on Arch Linux after having gone through
the most recent versions of Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE,
and MEPIS.
Ok, good to hear that I'm not just crazy. I mean, on Fedora, sound worked out of
the box. If you don't mind the cursor not being able to keep up with the
waveform that is. Worked in a totally unusable fashion for pro audio, and I've
compiled a lot of stuff from source and couldn't figure out how to fix it. I
probably could have done a Linux From Scratch several times now in the amount of
time I've spent auditioning "Desktop" distros.
http://www.archlinux.org/
It's a fairly lightweight distro, which behaves very *bsd like. If you
use the i386 build (not the more recent x86-64 builds which don't have
the same package support) a good amount of community packages already
exist. The overall speed of the system is quite good and is definitely
better than most that I've tried.
I've found that pre-built binaries are missing for some of the key sound
apps (like zynaddsubfx) but community supported 'pkg' makefiles exist
and work well (available at the url below).
That sounds ok, as I can't think of any proaudio app I didn't end up
reconfiguring and recompiling anyway ...
Does it use a BSD style port system? I really liked gentoos emerge, but they've
gone and screwed up the underlying foundation in order to have a gui installer.
How does Arch compare with somthing like slackware?
Thanks
Iain