Re: [LAU] Going from window to linux

Hi Mike. On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 3:52 AM, JiNN <jinnproduction(a)gmail.com> wrote: One nice thing about ext3, the default filesystem for most Linux distributions, is that you almost never have to defragment the drive. That's not the same as using RAM efficiently, but it is very handy... If nothing else, applications are less likely to be mysteriously added to your boot process automatically. Unfortunately, figuring out how to make a program NOT start automatically when it does so by default is actually quite harder on Linux. Killing a program that you don't want to be running is far more reliable in Linux... sometimes too reliable- if Windows won't let you kill a necessary system process, Linux doesn't even warn you... I wrote my own sequencer for microtonal music in Pure Data. I use it and Csound extensively, though neither is standard sequencer fare. I have found Rosegarden sufficient for that, but I have heard of others not finding it so. I do believe Linux is way behind in this department, partially because programming efficient and powerful user interfaces is BORING, and no one pays Linux developers to do it, so, I suspect, they let those kinds of things lag a bit; the software can DO great things, but it's not always easy to use. Ardour may be the exception, and someone was contracted to add MIDI sequencing support to it last summer. He did so, but to this day I don't believe his improvements have been added to the main branch >:( In my experience this is a good idea; audio was really the only reason I wanted to use Linux, but that made me pretty miserable when trying to learn very basic things, realizing I was struggling to understand certain concepts and that even when I did understand them, I was barely any closer to making the music I wanted to make. Some people on this list may tell you, I was a huffy puffy bitch sometimes. Some key things to check out if you want to kickstart your audio setup: Jack, chrt, realtime preemption, kernel building, aconnect (for connecting MIDI apps, something like MIDIYoke), top and htop (for checking CPU and memory usage), and bash scripting. As others mentioned, you often string several programs together to do the necessary tasks, rather than one program doing it all. Because of this, knowing a little about "bash scripting" can make it far simpler; a "bash script" can start all of the necessary programs in the right order, so you don't have to always start them manually :) I have never heard of ASIO4ALL on Linux; AFAIK ASIO in general only runs on Windows, and is probably unnecessary. Jack does low-latency (IMO better) on Linux. One thing I did like about ASIO4ALL was that it allowed realtime audio input to Reason- but, as we all know, Reason doesn't run on Linux, so no loss! I got a lot from Florian Schmidt's page, I'm sure it's not hard to find. He provides some details that it always seemed like everyone else knew but me. One last word of advice: if you find Linux interests you, you're bound to encounter some outwardly rude people. Obviously getting nasty with them doesn't help, and it satisfies them in some kind of way; but sometimes a severely sarcastic remark, perhaps a self-deprecating one, really seems to win them over. It hasn't been my experience here, but if you ever go on the #debian IRC channel, you might want to set up some counseling beforehand, just in case. Good luck, hope to see you on the list in the future. -Chuckk -- http://www.badmuthahubbard.com