Hi Anahata More to that, Mandrake has a kernel that has a lot of patches and extras added. This means that if you want to add a patch like low latency or preempt, you have to grab another kernel RPM, as the patches don't apply cleanly to the Mandrake kernel source. This is especially annoying for those stuck on dial-up, like myself. Regards Luke At 08:06 PM 1/04/2003, Anahata wrote:

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 08:32, Daniel James wrote: Indeed, my goal when setting up Linux for end users is to try and make sure they never even see a command line. Musicians aren't geeks and neither are most corporate types. Slackware is great for when you have that one machine in your mom's basement and it doesn't matter to you to keep track of what file came from where or to be able to uninstall stuff cleanly. It's sort of the Windows model of installing software, only with source. Gentoo is sort of the best of both worlds, but I don't feel like waiting 36 hours for it to compile everything I need for a usable desktop, whether corporate or musical. Debian is nifty except for the installer. I understand they're working on it and maybe in another year I'll be able to recommend it to non-technical people. Lindows/Xandros/Lycoris are just too limited for musicians or for the kind of people who pay me to make Linux work for them. Red Hat is okay as a server distro but they just don't seem to understand the desktop and unless you're a power user who knows enough to install apt-rpm, you're stuck in dependency hell. I use and recommend Mandrake (but never switch to the latest and greatest until a month or two after it's out) because urpmi is sort of a nice compromise between plain RPM, and apt. Its installer is simpler than the various Windows installers and I can set up my own RPM repositories with automagical dependency checking that my users can set up and install packages without ever having to see a bash prompt. The only downside I can see to Mandrake is that they're in receivership right now and that makes them a big question mark for versions subsequent to 9.1. There are certainly problems even with the automagical dependency checking systems, like someone will build a package that needed some new obscure library that they had installed from cooker (the unstable Mandrake branch) or from source and didn't bother to provide an RPM for, but people generally find those pretty quick. There are lots more Mandrake urpmi sources than just what you find at Mandrake mirrors, to wit: http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/urpmiweb.php - make sure you click "show specific sources too" as it includes a lot more. A couple that aren't listed there include http://rpm.nyvalls.se/9.0/RPMS - thac's RPM's, a huge collection of audio apps and http://www.kudla.org/rpm/i586 - my own collection which isn't really audio related but as long as i'm mentioning sources... ;) Karel, I definitely feel your pain with regards to dependency hell, but I won't be running 9.1 until I think enough people have guinea-pigged it for me. If anyone running Mandrake 9.0 has problems with a particular audio app RPM I'd be happy to rebuild it, stick it in my repository and work out dependency issues with you. That way everyone (well, mdk 9.0 users) can benefit. Rob

mmm... let me see... john chowning? charles dodge? paul lansky? james dashow? i could go on and on, and please note that i've been kind enough not to even mention iannis xenakis. i consider myself a musician. i studied composition more than seven years at the university in my home town. everything very traditional, generous amounts of harmony, counterpoint, fugue and orchestration. i'm not a programmer and never studied anything related to computer sciences. i guess i'm not a "geek", although i'm not completely sure what the term means exactly. i just taught myself enough to be able to use a command line, to build my own binaries from sources, and edit my configuration files by hand using vim. and that i prefer to installing precompiled rpms and using graphical tools for configuration. just my personal preference. i use linuxfromscratch and very happy with it. do not understand me wrong, i know perfectly well that many users, musicians or not, prefer a different approach, and that distributions like redhat and mandrake have done a lot to make linux more accessible to many users. i have recommended redhat and planet ccrma to many of my students. i'm reacting now because i'm just fed up with those generalizations saying that "musicians" don't want to see a command line, "musicians" don't want to compile, "musicians" want to have everything hidden, "musicians" don't want to program, "musicians" don't want to learn anything new or different, "musicians" are lazy, "musicians" are stupid.... there are many different kinds of musicians, you know. some of them got their hands dirty programming. thanks to them, to people like chowning or dodge, who are indeed great musicians, we have many of the tools available today. please excuse if i overreacted, i sincerely didn't mean to offend anyone. it's just that i'm being a bit offended myself by all those assumptions about musicians in general, that imply i'm not one of them. best, lj

That's my experience. Outside of the Linux audio community, I haven't met a musician who was interested in computers for their own sake. Generally, I find musicians relate to computers as other artists do - as a tool which they expect to 'just work' - or as something arcane and unreliable, and best avoided altogether. I never said any of those things. I'm optimistic that Linux will soon provide reliable creative tools that are widely accessible - not something we've ever had before. I bet a Linux box now costs less in real terms than one decent open reel tape recorder did in the 1950s. Cheers Daniel

Especially the new version of Rosegarden, Rosegarden4 is really stable and has a decent note resolution, so its been working well with my asrx sampler. I coould also export the sequences as csound score files and then re-work the tunes within csound, so I can't imagine finding anything on windows/mac (unless it gets ported to osx of course). http://www.brianredfern.org On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Patrick Shirkey wrote:

el Tue, 1 Apr 2003 18:06:18 +0100 Daniel James <daniel(a)mondodesigno.com> escribió: of course you didn't, i didn't want to imply you had said that. my message wasn't intended to be personal, nobody in the list has said like things, i just wanted to show how one generalization can lead to another, and sooner or later they'll reach a point you'll resent. best, lj --

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003 13:28:39 -0300, luis jure wrote / a écrit: Hey! it's just me and my friends you are describing ;D Seriously, I have compiled lots of audio apps successfully (alsa, mplayer, soundtracker...) and even rebuild my kernel for low-latency. But now I'm really happy with Planet CCRMA rpms. cheers. Guy CLO~ ----------------------------------------------- #ICQ 37736372 #219055 http://counter.li.org ----------------------------------------------- http://perso.wanadoo.fr/guy.clotilde/index.html -----------------------------------------------

I'd have to agree. I spent some weeks getting a fresh gentoo partition running, getting ardour working, only to get stopped dead in my tracks with a (not yet proven) kernel bug in ext3 code. I threw my hands in the air with disgust and had RH8 + planet going in 8 hours (incl burning/verifying the ISOs) having never tried that route before (thanks Fernando). I'm not a dummy, but I can read the instructions (Fernando - may I suggest a link to an rpm repair page: I remember why I ditched MDK/RH). Tonight I captured 3 hours of rehearsal direct to disk. No glitches. Zero to un-coordinated hero in a day.... R

On Tue, 2003-04-01 at 14:09, Jan "Evil Twin" Depner wrote: Jan, I'd only offer that if ext3 does the job for a specific individual, then I don't think there's anything wrong with using it. In most case (except apparently current Gentoo!) ;-) it is better tested and probably more stable than reiserfs. If someone knows they're going to only use so many tracks and maybe isn't pushing the limits of what there hardware can do, or doesn't possibly try to run their sound card at the very lowest latencies all the time like you and I, then I would probably recommend ext3. On the other hand, since I do tend to push the limits of what my hardware can do, should I EVER be able to run Alsa again, then at that unknown date in the future I'll probably be running reiserfs. Problem is, that date appears to be so far in the future anymore that I'm starting to expect xfs to be meat and potatoes by then. ;-) Cheers, Mark

Rob, You're gonna love the EWS88MT. It's basically an equivalent of my DSP 2000. I really like the envy24 chipset. Zero latency monitoring using the internal mixer is the best! Once you get it you should seriously consider moving to reiserfs (or XFS, I think Mark is right on that) if you have a dedicated audio data disk. I could actually see a reduction in xruns when I switched to reiserfs from ext3. Jan On Wed, 2003-04-02 at 11:12, rob fell wrote:

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 16:15, Rob wrote: Since when?

Hi: Times are changing. Soon, with the help and expertise of folks on this list and others, recording studios will be as accessible as any pencil is today. We just put up the Mac basic recording studio recommendation, and will soon follow that with an extraordinary PC-based basic recording studio recommendation for folks wanting to start community-based recording studios that offer free recording services for all local residents. Thanks, Tom Poe Open Studios Reno, NV http://www.studioforrecording.org/ On Tuesday 01 April 2003 19:31, you wrote:

Gosh. I normally don't like to perpetuate threads like this, but it's actually an interesting phenomenon to me, as I'm the system administrator at a school of music with about four hundred case studies. As much as I had always thought computers and music went hand in hand, there doesn't seem to be much of a hard and fast rule about this. (I guess it's silly to expect a stereotype, no matter how benign, to be true.) For example, the prof who teaches electronic music is a Macintosh guru. He runs his own OSX web and streaming servers, and can get his way around on the command line just fine. He writes crazy MAX patches that interface with video, sound, and lighting. He's set up streaming video conference classes with instructors in South America. However, he often remarks how he feels that technology gets in the way of his composing, and that he can really only focus on one at a time. One of my most savvy users placed 2nd in the Tchaikovsky competition and frequently tours the world giving concerts. But, I also have a number of world travelers who can't open a document without double clicking on it. What I've generally found is that everyone knows how to do exactly what they need to know how to do (i.e. the guy who has the Jazz radio show can run circles around me in ProTools and DigiPerformer, the staff member who does up the programs kicks my ass in PageMaker, most of the students here can rip and burn six or seven CDs at a time), and very few go much beyond that. But - if what they need to know how to do is generate CSound files with Perl scripts, they sit down with a book or come to my office and learn it. I've only given one "howto" presentation here to the faculty in the last year, because that one presentation generated about a month's worth of one on one training with faculty who were ecstatic to try something new with computers. So - I don't know. I'd bet if a faculty member needed to use Linux to make some noise (like I do), they'd probably take the time to learn how to use Linux, just like my faculty are taking the time to learn how to switch from OS9 to OSX. It's gotten to a point now where it's not uncommon for me to walk in to help a client and they've got one or two terminals open, just trying to fix the problem the (new) old fashioned way. Mike. ----------------------------------------- Michael Solberg Computer Services Specialist IV The University of Georgia School of Music -----------------------------------------

Matthew Yee-King wrote: Hah, My first big one is on the 19 April. Kudos though, I have listened to AGCG alot on Groovetech. When will you get some airtime? -- Patrick Shirkey - Boost Hardware Ltd. Http://www.boosthardware.com Http://www.djcj.org - The Linux Audio Users guide ======================================== Being on stage with the band in front of crowds shouting, "Get off! No! We want normal music!", I think that was more like acting than anything I've ever done. Goldie, 8 Nov, 2002 The Scotsman

On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 09:56:11AM +0100, Daniel James wrote: fair enough. I just couldn't resist responding to the 'show me a musician who compiles kernels etc' sentence becaouse i could prove exactly the opposite to be true. I'm basically bitter because i'm on a powerpc so i can't get planet rpms. ;) venue is 93 feet east, http://www.93feeteast.co.uk/ the night is called Eat Your Own Ears. The time is normal club times i think. cheers matthew

Daniel James wrote: Daniel - you may be getting a bit confused here, it was another poster who made the comment ( " Show me a musician who wants to take the time to patch his kernel and I'll show you a musician who isn't getting any gigs." ) that Matthew + I we're replying to. Unless of course, you are on the list as two different people, hehe :=) cheers, Jordan.

Rob wrote: Well I'm playing regularly and this month have two gigs with an estimated audience +/- 10000 :P -- Patrick Shirkey - Boost Hardware Ltd. Http://www.boosthardware.com Http://www.djcj.org - The Linux Audio Users guide ======================================== Being on stage with the band in front of crowds shouting, "Get off! No! We want normal music!", I think that was more like acting than anything I've ever done. Goldie, 8 Nov, 2002 The Scotsman

Hi Daniel Yes, the other distros do it as well, but from my experience at least, Mandrake's kernel is the most patched. At least RedHat's default kernels in RH8 have low latency. If you want to use the latest version of ALSA, you still need to have kernel sources and the like handy. That in a sense is building the kernel, as you are adding to the kernel's contents. I guess I was making a personal feeling known. I would rather have a vanilla kernel source for a default distro kernel, and patch it myself, rather than having a kernel pre-patched with stuff I won't want. I agree. Regards Luke.

On 2003.04.01 07:27 Luke Yelavich wrote: We shipped the low-latency pre-emptible capabilities kernel with Mandrake 9.1. You can install it with one command. (urpmi kernel-multimedia) We also ship the vanilla kernel with every version, which you can also install with one command. (urpmi kernel-linus) Austin -- Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc. Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com) homepage: www.groundstate.ca

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 10:06, Austin wrote: I've noticed in recent versions that rpm resource naming has started to vary enough between RH and Mandrake that when you try to install a RH package sometimes it complains that some library isn't there because Mandrake's naming scheme mandates a "lib" in front of the name. You could get around this by adding extra "Provides: " lines in the libs' spec files, though that will naturally cause problems with libraries that also come with executables, but I've never wanted to try to rebuild that many RPM's from the base distribution myself. Rob

Sorry, Austin, but in practice, installing an RPM intended for one distribution on another distribution, is not particularly likely to work. It may refuse to install unless you "force" it. It may install and destabilize your system. I find it much easier and safer to install from source tarballs than to install a "foreign" RPM. In theory an RPM package could be crafted and tested to be installable on multiple versions or distributions, but this is rarely done by those who build RPM packages. Perhaps the Linux Standard Base will change this, eventually. On Tuesday 01 April 2003 10:06 am, Austin wrote: -- "Can you remember the future? Forget it!"

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 12:19, Speaker to Vegetables wrote: And I find it much easier and safer to find the source RPM to that foreign RPM, try rpm --rebuild, and if that doesn't work, make the couple of lines of necessary changes in the spec file and stick the resulting now-Mandrake-specific RPM out on my website for anyone to use. Then if it turns out I don't want it anymore, I'm not stuck looking for needles in the haystack that is my filesystem when I want to uninstall it, nor do I have to worry about it stomping some other application's files as has been known to happen. I'm not ashamed of being a usability nazi. I won't be satisfied until Linux is easier to use for non-geeks and easier to manage in large quantities than both Mac and Windows, and I'm doing what little I can to help that along. I don't think it's any coincidence that all these usable audio apps started appearing once the Linux desktops started maturing, and I doubt the trend is going to reverse. Rob

Hallo, torbenh(a)gmx.de hat gesagt: // torbenh(a)gmx.de wrote: Hey, we can do this, too. From snapshot.README in ardour-AGNULA: 1) fakeroot ./debian/rules snapshot This will log into the CVS server and download the sources, then it will build an orig.gz the date in YYYYMMDD format is used as version. The debian/changelog is updated to reflect this. 2) Proceed with dpkg-buildpackage to build the binary package ;-) ciao -- Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__

Hallo, torbenh(a)gmx.de hat gesagt: // torbenh(a)gmx.de wrote: Yeah, debian dependencies can be equivalent to dll-hell in windows. But I'm running Debian unstable and there sometimes the dependencies just aren't fully okay. ciao -- Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__

On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 05:16:58AM -0800, R Parker wrote: src_compile() { sh autogen.sh econf || die "configure failed" # while troubleshooting upgrades to ardour-cvs-0.6 i changed from # emake to make. Can probably change back. Need to test. make || die "parallel make failed" } would change to src_compile() { sh autogen.sh econf || die "configure failed" cd gtk-ardour; make version.h; cd .. # while troubleshooting upgrades to ardour-cvs-0.6 i changed from # emake to make. Can probably change back. Need to test. make || die "parallel make failed" } But indeed... i think paul will be faster than jje at gentoo... emerge ardour-cvs only works if cvs works out of the box. -- torben Hohn http://galan.sourceforge.net -- The graphical Audio language

On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 01:06:22PM +0900, Jon Ellis wrote: yes right... but i have proven, that it is possible to hack the ebuild on your system, to do those temprary fixes and still have package management. i am looking forward to this... what apps are you thinking of ? -- torben Hohn http://galan.sourceforge.net -- The graphical Audio language

On 2003.04.01 10:51 Moeflon wrote: have you read this? http://groundstate.ca/mdkaw.html Let me know if I can help. Austin -- Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc. Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com) homepage: www.groundstate.ca

On 2003.04.01 11:49 Moeflon wrote: Yeah, no problem. Austin -- Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc. Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com) homepage: www.groundstate.ca

That checkinstall utility can also produce RPM packages and DEB packages. Worth using it. Loauc. ----- Original Message ----- From: "jordan muscott" <jordan(a)no-future.com> To: <linux-audio-user(a)music.columbia.edu> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 12:31 PM Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] MDK sound-RPMs troubles / Sound in Slackware?