Help with setting up Arch DAW environment

What other apps and distros do you use to round out your studio?

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eric71
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Re: Help with setting up Arch DAW environment

Post by eric71 »

Have been away from Arch for a few weeks. The latest Wine (1.1.35 at the time) led to some out of control CPU usage by certain VSTs for some reason in Reaper, and in trying to downgrade Wine, I somehow messed things up worse, lost my patience and jumped ship to Debian Squeeze and the RT kernel from Pengutronix. An incomplete update to KDE completely borked that installation after only a couple days and I jumped to Mepis 8.5 and it has been working well with the RT kernel from 64 Studio and the stable wine version from Debian Lenny.

But I'm missing Arch and Archaudio, and I'm missing KDEmod. I've noticed that Wine has bumped up to 1.1.36 and I'm thinking of reinstalling Arch to see if my problems are gone. I was going to wait for Chakra beta, but I might just go with the normal Arch install for the learning experience. At any rate, this long winded train of thought is leading to a question about AUR. I never used it in my first go around with Arch, and I suspect it might be useful for dealing with Wine regressions. The Arch repositories seem to track the development releases of Wine, but if I run into problems, it would be nice to use the stable version which I think you can get via AUR. Is it complicated to use AUR, and once a package is installed is it easy to update, remove, or go back to the version from the repositories with pacman?
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funkmuscle
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Re: Help with setting up Arch DAW environment

Post by funkmuscle »

no, AUR is great. the first thing to do is to check the wiki.
I use yaourt to build and install packages from AUR....
The latest wine is great.
I've done like you before and tried other flavours of Linux audio distros and I come back... Deb distros frustrates the living daylight out of me especially Ubuntu. I've tried my best to like it but I can't.

I like how Arch can be installed "just" for audio/multimedia. I know a few other distros do that but for me, but the rolling release and cutting edge style I love.

So check the wiki, forums and use yaourt. It's like pacman but it will also install the AUR packages.
eric71
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Re: Help with setting up Arch DAW environment

Post by eric71 »

Yaourt looks really cool. Can't wait to try using it. Definitely nothing to compare to that in the Debian world. One of these days Shaman2 will have AUR support, too. I've got to get over my comfort with GUI apps and embrace the command line, though.
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funkmuscle
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Re: Help with setting up Arch DAW environment

Post by funkmuscle »

yeah, I hear ya about gui. I like command line better but gui apps are still my friend.. :D

edit: aurget is another good one. it's like a mixture of yaourt and pacman but not apt-get.
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