22 Dec
2006
22 Dec
'06
1:59 a.m.
After reading a few of the recent threads I think I should mention a few things from my
experience.
I've had good luck with 64Studio, seems like a great fast/easy install. But it lacks
many apps that I'm used to. Maybe that will change in the future.
I have both 64Studio and 64 bit Ubuntu with low latency installed on one of the machines.
I did a lot of testing between the two and Ubuntu always liked to give a few xruns in the
sub 6ms lantency settings, where as 64Studio was very stable. I even cleaned up
Ubuntu's startups, etc, and could not get it to settle down.
Last week I had the interesting experience helping set up linux on on a 17" Apple
notebook(the high end one, dual core, bla, bla, bla). We managed to get linux on the
machine and get it to boot separately from osX with a lot of work, but with a lot of
satisfaction afterwards.
Since the macbook pros are EFI partitioned monsters it took a while to get something to
boot on it in the first place. This is where 64Studio surprised me, it was able to deal
with the 2 partitions that we could use on the machine, and even install on it(no, we
never tested a full install of 64Studio).
Anyway, after that we copied over a 64 bit gentoo system that was compiled for the
hardware in the machine(which is also kind of hard since intel dual cores are new to gcc).
The networking on the ethernet port was pretty easy to set up and we were able to finish
the install from the local gentoo repo. Then, everything was recompiled again on the
native machine.
Graphics look good(open gl, etc), lots of stuff works(even the intel HDA sound was real
good on it(Apple must use the better stuff on that machine)). The only show stopper is
that linux hasn't caught up to the newest wireless chipset in that machine. We fixed
that by buying a $40 wireless usb stick and using it for wireless. Last I heard, there
are also a few jack xrun issues on the intel dual core in there, but I think they may be
worked out.
Anyway, the macbook pro makes a real great linux machine. OSX is still there if they want
to boot into Steve Jobs wonderfull world of eye candy. This machine was bought to use as
a linux machine, the actual cost wasn't a whole lot more then any other make for
something in that high end of hardware.
So:
64Studio works great here, it even has some special abilities.
The intel chipset actually sounds pretty good with linux in some cases.
Tracey,
Who had a good time sewing together a nice looking case for the laptop ;)