AVLinux (and KXStudio) development

[tnovelli]

Hi gmaq, falktx, danboid, etc-- I want to run some questions/ideas past you guys. Basically, AVLinux works great for me... except that I need a 64bit OS to host 64bit VMs for my dev/sysadmin work (a 64bit VM won't run under a 32bit host). So I'm planning to build a lightweight 64bit studio OS based on debian7 and kxstudio... more or less a prototype for AVLinux 7, which would basically be KXStudio with a lightweight UI.

Glen, do you have any notes or scripts I might find useful? (bearing in mind that deb7 will break a lot of things)
What's the build process like? (I'm guessing Debian net install, rt kernel, LXDE... build audio apps... lots of testing & tweaking... then Remastersys)
I take it Gnome3 dependencies are a big headache in deb7, right?

I won't worry about installing all the A-V apps bundled with AVLinux, just the handful that I use.

Install scripts are a high priority... in general they're too flaky and cumbersome. I can do rapid testing in VMs but that can't cover all the hardware variations, so I'll also simplify things. I want graphics & text "live boot" options, with a friendly text-only install script for the simplest scenario (use a whole disk, ext4 fs, etc). For dual boot or anything fancy I'd rather run fdisk/mkfs myself, run a script like "setup /dev/sda2" to copy files, and manually install a bootloader only if needed. Further configuration (language, time, drivers, packages, etc) can wait until the OS is successfully installed.

I'd like to have two distribution images (32 and 64bit versions of each)-- a ~4GB demo DVD with lots of apps, and a ~200MB "minimal desktop" image. The latter would be good for alpha testing... quick upload/download, no need for torrents.

[GMaq]

@tnovelli,

I'm glad to hear you like AV Linux, unfortunately I don't have much to share in the way of scripts especially for Debian 7. Your observation on building a prototype for AV Linux 7 using the KXStudio repos is actually a very astute observation and something I am still mulling over. You see with falkTX moving his repos to Debian there is really will not be much need for something like AV Linux any more. When KXStudio was primarily KDE and Ubuntu-based we kind of served 2 opposite ends of the Linux Audio market but with falkTX serving both the Debian and Ubuntu distributions and providing packages that will work in anything from KDE4 to Openbox AV Linux would seem to be redundant.

To be honest I am becoming quite disillusioned with the direction the LInux world is going, I still find Debian 6 to be a fast, efficient and fully functional daily-use and development environment personally. Losing Gnome 2's Nautlus with it's scripting extensibility in Debian 7 should go down as a horrific loss in the Linux history books, losing a simple and light Login Manager like SLiM is also bad news for light Distros. Kernels beyond 3.7 have completely broken my ability to use my Tascam US-122 which I have used for years... so I am not a happy camper right now...

Let me be VERY clear that I am a supporter of KXStudio and I think one of the best things to happen EVER in Linux Audio is falkTX moving his amazing work to Debian, I have absolutely no animosity toward him and if AV Linux's 15 minutes of fame are up that's totally cool, I can't think of anyone else who would be better to hand the keys over to... however in the meantime...

afaik no one's in a rush here...

[briandc]

@tnovelli,

I'm glad to hear you like AV Linux, unfortunately I don't have much to share in the way of scripts especially for Debian 7. Your observation on building a prototype for AV Linux 7 using the KXStudio repos is actually a very astute observation and something I am still mulling over. You see with falkTX moving his repos to Debian there is really will not be much need for something like AV Linux any more. When KXStudio was primarily KDE and Ubuntu-based we kind of served 2 opposite ends of the Linux Audio market but with falkTX serving both the Debian and Ubuntu distributions and providing packages that will work in anything from KDE4 to Openbox AV Linux would seem to be redundant.

To be honest I am becoming quite disillusioned with the direction the LInux world is going, I still find Debian 6 to be a fast, efficient and fully functional daily-use and development environment personally. Losing Gnome 2's Nautlus with it's scripting extensibility in Debian 7 should go down as a horrific loss in the Linux history books, losing a simple and light Login Manager like SLiM is also bad news for light Distros. Kernels beyond 3.7 have completely broken my ability to use my Tascam US-122 which I have used for years... so I am not a happy camper right now...

Let me be VERY clear that I am a supporter of KXStudio and I think one of the best things to happen EVER in Linux Audio is falkTX moving his amazing work to Debian, I have absolutely no animosity toward him and if AV Linux's 15 minutes of fame are up that's totally cool, I can't think of anyone else who would be better to hand the keys over to... however in the meantime...

afaik no one's in a rush here...

FWIW,

I don't think AVlinux should be "abandoned" if that's what you're hinting at here. I think more and more people are moving towards linux even though the music-end of things might not show it. Just look at Android and the success it's having. People (especially the younger generations) are savvy and keen on making apps for their computers, and linux gives them open doors that Windows and Mac cannot.

One idea might be to push AVlinux over to the redhat area. (I have no idea how difficult that would be, as I'm not a programmer unfortunately.) But redhat and slackware have lots of very dedicated users, particularly in "professional" fields (from what I've read). I personally haven't enjoyed those distros (the few I've tried) as much as debian-based ones, but to each his own.

My other thought (speaking in general now) is that linux has enough distros. We don't need more distros, we need rock-solid apps. And the music arena is no exception.

Just my 2c..

brian

[totalchaos]

I don't think AVlinux should be "abandoned" if that's what you're hinting at here.....

......My other thought (speaking in general now) is that linux has enough distros. We don't need more distros, we need rock-solid apps. And the music arena is no exception.
brian

I totally agree here, on both points. AVLinux is now more popular than ever, due to the fact that is more usable than ever. And its more powerful feature is that it is based on Debian over the years.

As for Debian Wheezy, we already have a rock-solid music distro based on it, called Tango Studio. Bearing in mind the "Debian multimedia team" and FalkTX's KXStudio moving to Debian as well....

@tnovelli I believe that more distro forks, would be a waste of effort. There should be a better way to support the Linux audio community, than fragmenting it even more....

[totalchaos]

not sure what TangoStudio position is here....:

I didn't wish for the role of the TangoStudio promoter around here, but it seems that after all, somebody is gonna do it

TS is using Debian Wheezy as a base. It has a custom Realtime kernel 3.2 and a selection of fewer but well tested apps for audio production coming from a separate repository. TS uses Mate for the desktop environment, resulting of a very lightweight and user friendly system. I should say that TS approach feels like a legacy of what was once 64studio stable.
The downsides are that TS does't have an official installer and a live DVD at this point in time, probably due to not getting enough attention from the community. And also this is a French distribution, so for me as not speaking french, i am handling everything on my own (not that there is any annoying issues to handle)..... Yeah and it doesn't include Carla

http://tangostudio.tuxfamily.org/en/doc ... ngo-debian

PS: And here is a .pdf for the wget users:
http://tangostudio.tuxfamily.org/en/doc ... format=pdf

[tnovelli]

Wow, thanks for all the replies!
I should clarify that I'm in no hurry, I'm NOT creating a new distro, and I'm definitely not interested in making a ton of work for myself! I'm just customizing a Debian 7 system, modeled after AVLinux, to replace my aging Fedora 17 installation. Hopefully this will teach me enough about debian package/distro maintenance to be a useful member of the emerging KX/AV team.

@falktx,
Thanks for the crunchbang suggestion but I'm doing fine with vanilla Deb7. Yeah, I'm seeing some issues with KX packages... for example, ubuntu-lucid and debian-sid dependencies that can't be met. Down the line, if AVLinux 7 is to include a 'snapshot' of LX packages, some re-repacking might be necessary to prune KDE deps and such. But we'll see. Meanwhile I'll start testing your ISOs.
P.S. Don't worry about me, I'll build from source where necessary!

@GMaq,
I completely agree with you on the direction Linux is going (and Windows, Mac, Android, everything). But are those particular problems solved now? I just installed Nautilus 3.4.2 in my Deb7 VM, and scripts in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts do work. Maybe all the bitching convinced the devs to add backward compatibility. The default kernel is 3.2.46 so anything up to 3.6 should work fine. No problems with SLiM; 1.3.4 was in the wheezy main repository, and I see a little development action (http://developer.berlios.de/projects/slim/).

@briandc,
Fedora has been pretty solid for me the past few years. Love their 'plain vanilla upstream packages' philosophy. Their devs actually care about the kernel 3.8+ usb-audio problems. When it works, the default kernel gets better realtime performance than the 3.6-rt kernel in AVLinux. That said, Fedora is too bleeding-edge AND too enterprisey for me. First to adopt Gnome3. SElinux by default. Upgrades tend to break audio apps. Audio plugins never worked right. The package system is SLOW, though less prone to breakage than Debian or Arch.

I'm leaning toward Debian because AV and KX use it, and there's also a movement to make .deb THE standard Linux package format, at least for mainstream distros. Still, Fedora is worth considering especially for a 'snapshot' distro like AVLinux.

@totalchaos,
Maybe I missed Tango Studio because their website needs work! No dates anywhere, the tango-debian link looks like a link for Debian Linux itself, and the page that comes up first on search engines says "based on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04.4"; same thing in French and Spanish. But now that you mention it, I'll take a look.

Seems to me fragmentation is decreasing, with AV and KX tentatively coming together. Maybe we can collaborate with Tango on a live installer; it'd be a good way to build bridges with the French linux audio community. They seem to know things nobody else does. As for DreamStudio and UbuntuStudio the general consensus on this board seems to be "please go away, you're scaring away newbies and wasting our time"

[GMaq]

Hi,

Was tired and grumpy when I answered this late last night..

To be clear AV Linux 6.0.X is alive and well and seeing continuing updates to the packages FTP so there is no 'abandonment' happening, I have a lot of recent handy improvements and convenience features that I might even roll into a fresh 6.0.2 ISO snapshot. just looking at all the angles and realities of what moving to Wheezy will mean with falkTX's packages already there and there is no reason for both of us to play the same tune and that will mean changes in the future. For now I'm still rolling with 6.0.X as long as it's wheels will keep turning.

[dednikko]

Well crap. I've been using DreamStudio for a while now, and had no idea that it was considered to be sub par. I suppose it's time to migrate to KXStudio?

@Gmaq, I also have an AVLinux install on the laptop. It's phenomenally stable and fast. Your distro is why I bought Mixbus and nearly every LinuxDSP plugin. Frankly, you're a badass, and your manual for A/V Linux should be required reading for, like, everybody. Kudos.

[GMaq]

@GMaq,
I completely agree with you on the direction Linux is going (and Windows, Mac, Android, everything). But are those particular problems solved now? I just installed Nautilus 3.4.2 in my Deb7 VM, and scripts in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts do work. Maybe all the bitching convinced the devs to add backward compatibility. The default kernel is 3.2.46 so anything up to 3.6 should work fine. No problems with SLiM; 1.3.4 was in the wheezy main repository, and I see a little development action (http://developer.berlios.de/projects/slim/).

Well then, that is some good news indeed! A few months ago neither of these things were working in Wheezy to my knowledge so if reason has prevailed then perhaps my estimation that Linux is going to hell in a handbasket is both premature and overstated

@dednikko

Hey man thanks! And thanks most of all for actually reading the manual... that sucker took many hours to write!

[tnovelli]

@dednikko
Do *you* notice anything substandard about DreamStudio? I haven't tried it... all I can glean from the website is that he's really drinking the Ubuntu kool-aid (Unity desktop, jack-pulseaudio integration, etc) and that's a problem for many of us here.

@GMaq
Overstated perhaps, but it's still a mess. For example, the USB trainwreck... October 2012, I guess - that's when I updated to kernel 3.6.3 (probably from 3.4.x)... then in July there was a big social-media brouhaha about sexism and verbal abuse and incompetence on the linux USB team (Linus: "This piece-of-shit commit is marked for stable, but you clearly never even test-compiled it, did you?"). You can read the tabloids (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/16 ... ight_back/) and the kernel mailing lists if you really care. Much ado about nothing. I see nobody quit, everyone responsible for the trainwreck is still involved... gotta keep their paychecks coming. Looks like they're mostly corporate employees... arrgh.

[dednikko]

@dednikko
Do *you* notice anything substandard about DreamStudio? I haven't tried it... all I can glean from the website is that he's really drinking the Ubuntu kool-aid (Unity desktop, jack-pulseaudio integration, etc) and that's a problem for many of us here.

Well, I have been running the KXStudio 12.04.3 snapshot on a new partition for a few days. KXS seems to be quicker on its feet, with about 3% to 5% lower DSP usage on the same Ardour 3.4 projects. I have noticed Ardourd to be less crashy and my plugins to have their custom UI much more often in KX as well. Fabla still refuses to auto load the drum kits, so I have to reload presets every time. Same with DrMr Sampler, but that is probably on the Ardour and OpenAV guys.

I am very fond of the Unity DE personally, mainly because of the Dash functionality (once all the internet search is disabled). Then again, KDE is no slouch.

[tatch]

@dednikko
Do *you* notice anything substandard about DreamStudio? I haven't tried it... all I can glean from the website is that he's really drinking the Ubuntu kool-aid (Unity desktop, jack-pulseaudio integration, etc) and that's a problem for many of us here.

Well, I have been running the KXStudio 12.04.3 snapshot on a new partition for a few days. KXS seems to be quicker on its feet, with about 3% to 5% lower DSP usage on the same Ardour 3.4 projects. I have noticed Ardourd to be less crashy and my plugins to have their custom UI much more often in KX as well. Fabla still refuses to auto load the drum kits, so I have to reload presets every time. Same with DrMr Sampler, but that is probably on the Ardour and OpenAV guys.

I am very fond of the Unity DE personally, mainly because of the Dash functionality (once all the internet search is disabled). Then again, KDE is no slouch.

it's trivially easy to install kxstudio repositories atop vanilla ubuntu if you want, and you could also just install unity atop kxstudio too.