Help with setting up Arch DAW environment

[SuperPenguin]

Hey gang. So recently I took the dive and installed Arch (64 bit) with a lovely little Fluxbox environment. I got everything going just fine, and now it's time for me to start building in the rt kernel and all the goodies that go along with it. This is where my n00bness to Arch comes in....

First off, I'm still trying to understand the AUR/PKGBUILD thing. I suck at getting pkgbuild to ever successfully install anything. I followed the wiki article about how to do it, but for some reason, I keep screwing it up somehow. Wish I could post up some of the errors I get, but right now I'm at work. Also, I saw that there is already a pro audio area for arch users (google group).. so I used svn and checked out the latest copy of what is there. Now that I got all of it.. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO LOL.

So...

Any sage like advice is welcome on helping me get this environment going. Ya might need to spell things out for me a bit if you're kind enough to hold my hand on this

[funkmuscle]

dude, this is where I get all my help:
http://forums.archaudio.org/
Learn the AUR/PKGBUILD from the wiki at http://www.archlinux.org.
That's where you'll get most of your help because linux is becoming ubuntu now... Everybody seems to be using it...
Any other distro, try there home page, wikis, and forums. I'm diehard ArchLinux as I've tried so many distros and none stand up to Arch IMO and what I need included ubuntu, 64studio, and all the other Deb distros.
Once you've figured out the makepkg, the PKGBUILD and AUR, you'll see how easy Arch and how much control you have on customising your Arch to suit your needs.

Also, get the app yaourt in AUR... That helps you download and install apps from AUR including finding the dependencies, etc... But do read up on everything at the wiki.

[SuperPenguin]

Thanks for the reply. I am really strongly suspecting that I screwed something up somewhere along the way with configuring my arch install. Every time I try to do anything with a pkgbuild (btw thanks for the yaourt suggestion, that thing seriously rocks), the same dependency is missing. Something that sounds like ffrt or something like that. Sorry at work again, so I can't see it right now.

I have been living in the arch wiki for about a week now, learning this badboy inside out lol.

On a side note; amen to the ubuntu observation. That was the whole reason why I stopped using 64studio 3.0 beta.. it was beginning to feel way too much like ubuntu after they started piggybacking on their repositories. I fear that 64studio is going to suffer from the same bloat and overload of startup daemons like ubuntu studio does. I hope not, but it looks like it's going that way with the latest beta.

I'll venture over to the archaudio forum soon and get signed up with them when I'm back in front of my system. Thanks for the heads up man.

[funkmuscle]

no problem man.... The guys in the forum are very helpful. Also join the regular arch forum and ask there too. Our community is awesome. Nothing against ubuntu but everywhere you read, they brag about the cummunity but the funny thing is the arch community is what drew me to it outside of how fast it is and how easy it was to build it to my needs...
Also, Arch is on the bleeding edge and you have more freedom than ubuntu... the restricted drivers issues I never understood because I use the same pc with removal drives to test the different OS and only the deb based OS I have restricted issues with.
Also, the updates are faster too. Only SuSe's Packman site I've seen update as fast for new packages.

[schivmeister]

Actually 64Studio is not bad for a stable platform. I'd also consider Sidux. The only problem with the popular distros out there is that they're more confusing than even Gentoo when it comes to package maintenance. During my early Linux days, the first thing that scared me were the various split packages eg. for -devel and libraries, and of course the way restricted items were restricted.

On Arch, all you have to do is search for the package name in either a repository or AUR, and hand it over to makepkg if it's a source or pacman if it's a binary. LADSPA means LADSPA and JACK means JACK. No missing library to worry about. This doesn't mean that it's a perfect system, though honestly I'd say it is Wait wait that doesn't quite make much sense..uhmm.

Nevermind.

Well, with the right attitude, you won't be on your own most of the time if you decide to stick to this rolling-release distro. I recall the time I was searching for a distro to defect to from Gentoo, I came across some other minimalistic ones. What separated them from Arch was the size of the community. And no inverse proportions or politics there.

Oops..maybe I've said too much. First post after a long time and first free time after a long time.

[funkmuscle]

well said schiv... the -devel and libraries was so frustrating to me too.
A/V Linux is a smoking deb release... The dev switched platforms from ubuntu to deb.
I like that release but like you, I tried Gentoo also then I for Arch and never looked back...
To me it's perfect....well, you know what I mean.

[SuperPenguin]

Sigh...

Well I lost patience trying to get it up and running so for now, I went back to 64Studio. I just couldn't get the rt kernel installed and have my nvidia play nice. I don't think I have the time to fiddle with my install.. its a production environment for my web dev stuff and my daily computer. In other words, I just need my system ready to roll.

In the future I am going to try again though. I am extremely interested in building it all on my own terms.

[funkmuscle]

took me 3 tries before sticking with it... Now, no other distro matches IMO and I've tried all the DAW distros as well as most of the big names, minimals, etc. In fact, will try DreamLinux later today.
Yeah, when you do have the time come back to it and when you get it running, you'll ask yourself why didn't you stick with it in the first place... That was my trip.
You're back to 64Studio, maybe try A/V Linux...

[SuperPenguin]

I looked at A/V Linux and it looked good, but ideally I want to stick with a 64 bit userland when and where ever possible. I mean, I paid for the processing power for this, I might as well try to get my moneys worth lol

Maybe I'll repartition my drive in half, throw a production ready distro on and then dedicate the other side to an arch install. Since I can't really tinker and configure due to time constraints, I think I was rushing too much to really ever get my install to do what I wanted. Arch appears to be more like a fine wine.. it needs time and patience to get to where you want it hehe

[funkmuscle]

Arch appears to be more like a fine wine.. it needs time and patience to get to where you want it hehe

very expensive fine wine to me....
haven't had time yet for DreamLinux but will feedback once I'm done.

[eric71]

This thread is a little old, but I thought I would mention my recent experiences with Archaudio. I've been doing quite a bit of distro-hopping lately, and have been curious about Arch, but also a bit intimidated by it. Because of this, the Chakra project (Arch + KDEmod live/install CD) has been of great interest to me. When I read about the archaudio repositories, I thought I'd try the combo.

The Chakra live CD is still at alpha level, but once it is installed it is a beautiful distro. I used alpha3, as the more recent "Fuzzy" doesn't boot with intel video cards. I'm not sure I'd recommend it as an easy install yet, as there were a few tricks I had to figure out (and their forum and wiki are very helpful), but I would expect that when it hits beta it will be great. Once installed it was easy to add the archaudio repositories in Shaman, the graphical pacman frontend. I installed the realtime kernel, made the proper additions to limits.conf, and i was off and running. Great performance for RT audio even on a KDE4 desktop.

So for easy setup of Arch for DAW use, Chakra + Archaudio is becoming a real possibility.

[funkmuscle]

that's all I use dude.. ArchLinux... faster and easier than any other distro once installed... tried at the Deb distros and I get fed up with dependencies, etc...
schiv and the gang got a great setup started for archaudio, etc...

[SuperPenguin]

Sorry to bring such an old thread back to life.. and not be involved with this thread until now. Just recovered from a catastrophic system failure (involved a cup of water and a sneaky 3 year old)... anyways, I got arch installed however when I try to get over to www.archaudio.org, the site never responds. What is the repo address or should I not bother if the site is down??

thx

[funkmuscle]

I think they were doing some maintenance work a few weeks ago and it is still happening. I was at the site on Friday but the repos were down for sometime now.
I just tried to get to the site and it's down... Give it sometime.

[SuperPenguin]

ah well that explains it lol

I tried grabbing the kernel26-ice package from AUR last night as well, but there's a dependency that needs to be updated by the packager that prevents that from compiling too. Guess I'm in idle for a bit hehe.

thanks for the heads up on this, I'll give it another go soon.