Install from CD/???

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jmph
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Install from CD/???

Post by jmph »

Hey all,
I have an "old" server machine I'm trying to put KXStudio on. By 'old' I mean 2000~ish - dual P3/1000, 2GB SDRAM. I can't seem to get this thing to boot from a DVD no matter what I do.

If I swap the ATAPI DVD drive for a CD drive, it boots CDs just fine. There is no option to boot from USB in the BIOS even though it has USB ports. The machine is happily connected to my wired network and has internet access.

Is it possible to create a bootable CD (or even floppy or 100MB Zip disk) that pulls in the rest of KX from the network or USB and does a full-install? Or does anyone have an alternate suggestion?

Before someone chimes in and tells me to upgrade :p , I tried KX on an old laptop of similar specs (single P3 @ 1133 IIRC) last year and it ran well enough. Not blisteringly fast but reasonable. I will basically use this rig for multi-track recording on my M-Audio PCI sound card which isn't too taxing (my composing/sequencing workstation is even older, and runs DOS.)

Any ideas are appreciated!
jmph
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by jmph »

Aww, that's disappointing. Would like to at least give it a try... Is the OS itself SSE2 dependent or just the custom apps?
(I think my old laptop must have been an early P4 in that case, installing KX was no problem at all... It was pretty sluggish until I found an extra GB of RAM in a skip but then it went fine.)

I'll check out AV, not a huge fan of Xfce though. I *really* like the interface & design of KX which is why I was hoping to run it on my recording rig.
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by English Guy »

jmph wrote: I'll check out AV, not a huge fan of Xfce though. I *really* like the interface & design of KX which is why I was hoping to run it on my recording rig.
AV is Debian based, you should be able to install any window manager you like.
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by GMaq »

English Guy wrote:
jmph wrote: I'll check out AV, not a huge fan of Xfce though. I *really* like the interface & design of KX which is why I was hoping to run it on my recording rig.
AV is Debian based, you should be able to install any window manager you like.
Hi,

I don't really recommend that, AV Linux 6.X is very much customized and intentionally integrated for XFCE4 only. The future AV Linux 8.0 will be much more open-ended for that sort of thing...
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by jmph »

Hi Glen,
I have the same question for you as I did for FalkTX - is it possible to boot from a CD and install the rest of AVLinux from the network or a USB stick? (I can read the 4 GB ISO off a USB no problem, just can't boot from it.)

Note to all: I said I'm not a 'big fan' of Xfce, that doesn't mean I'll refuse to use a distro that runs it. :) Will certainly give it a try anyway.
(This thread could probably be moved to general distro discussions as we're getting off topic of KX...)
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by GMaq »

Hi,

Truthfully as far as the mechanics of how the Live boot works and with regard to the SSE2 thing AV Linux and KX Studio are very similar, so there would be nothing better to offer you there I'm afraid. AV Linux is often recommended for older machines simply because of XFCE4 running much lighter not because it is really optimized to run on pre-P4 machines. My suggested minimum would prolly be a Pentium4 2.0Ghz+ (or AMD equivalent) machine with 1Gb of RAM to be honest..

Sorry :oops:
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by English Guy »

If you cannot get a dedicated audio distro running, you could go old school, install Debian and compile whatever you cannot get from the repos and feel you really need.
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by DepreTux »

jmph wrote:Before someone chimes in and tells me to upgrade :p , I tried KX on an old laptop of similar specs (single P3 @ 1133 IIRC) last year and it ran well enough. Not blisteringly fast but reasonable. I will basically use this rig for multi-track recording on my M-Audio PCI sound card which isn't too taxing (my composing/sequencing workstation is even older, and runs DOS.)

Any ideas are appreciated!
I recently set up a PII 333MHz with 128MB RAM with debian wheezy. It ran ok with dwm. I didn't use it for modern music apps, but they could be compiled. The main purpose was as a general purpose OS to download software and manage a freeDOS partition where some trackers are installed. Everything worked fine.
I guess, you could get any distro that still compiles without sse2 and just compile your own multitrack software. Maybe the non suite?

Just out of curiosity, what composing/sequencing software are you running?
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by bazsound »

Why would you want too :/

machines like that if they are to be repurposed are probably better of as a router/firewall.

a not so old machine is pretty cheap, i picked up a laptop 2ghz dual core centrino with 2gb ram for £40 added power supply £20 and a 40gb sata drive for less than £10.

Runs lubuntu with kx repos and has no issues with multitracking. Id ont use it for mixdown though.
DepreTux
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by DepreTux »

bazsound wrote:Why would you want too :/

machines like that if they are to be repurposed are probably better of as a router/firewall.

a not so old machine is pretty cheap, i picked up a laptop 2ghz dual core centrino with 2gb ram for £40 added power supply £20 and a 40gb sata drive for less than £10.

Runs lubuntu with kx repos and has no issues with multitracking. Id ont use it for mixdown though.
If you don't live in Europe, the USA or Japan, you might have a use for such a machine.
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by jmph »

DepreTux wrote:I recently set up a PII 333MHz with 128MB RAM with debian wheezy. It ran ok with dwm. I didn't use it for modern music apps, but they could be compiled. The main purpose was as a general purpose OS to download software and manage a freeDOS partition where some trackers are installed. Everything worked fine.
I guess, you could get any distro that still compiles without sse2 and just compile your own multitrack software. Maybe the non suite?

Just out of curiosity, what composing/sequencing software are you running?
Impulse Tracker. :mrgreen: If you have a machine with an MMX CPU, ISA slots, and an SB AWE64 you unleash the true full power of IT: complete MIDI implementation and hardware instrument playback with resonant filters. So that's what I built. Runs only FreeDOS with no sign of any GUI (and it *flies*.)
bazsound wrote:Why would you want too :/

machines like that if they are to be repurposed are probably better of as a router/firewall.

a not so old machine is pretty cheap, i picked up a laptop 2ghz dual core centrino with 2gb ram for £40 added power supply £20 and a 40gb sata drive for less than £10.

Runs lubuntu with kx repos and has no issues with multitracking. Id ont use it for mixdown though.
Because I don't want a new machine, and I don't feel like spending money on something I don't want; especially not some clunky used laptop with horrible DACs that I'd have to dangle a bunch of lowest-bidder USB crap off of... This is a 4U ex-server that fits in my rack and runs nearly silently, has NO onboard soundchip which gets endlessly in the way, has IDE channels for my Zip drive & dual 320GB HDDs, and enough PCI slots for my SCSI card, M-Audio 2496, ethernet and NTSC-out video card. It's a piece of studio gear, not my general purpose web-surfing PC. 15 years ago everyone would have been drooling over the specs of this thing and I'm not doing anything with it that couldn't be done back then. Am REALLY TIRED of the rat race of upgrading constantly just to keep the bare functionality I already have.

...THAT SAID, I did just get a single-CPU P4 mobo I could swap in for free. I don't want to though, I really like the dual P3 setup. Disregarding SSE2 how much slower could it possibly be?

I'm looking into other distros now, Manjaro i686 has a CD small-installer and seems like it will work (although if I stick on Linux I'd rather stick to something that uses Apt/Synaptic and Deb repos - have heard lots of good advocacy about AUR though.) I'd be fine with Fluxbox or Xfce4 if KDE really won't run well. My other criterion is NO PULSEAUDIO.

For that matter, AROS/IcarOS and Haiku should also run nicely on this thing - anyone have any experience with them for audio production?
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by English Guy »

Could you run an older version of a distro on it, perhaps dynebolic? As long as it works is it important whether it is the latest and greatest?
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Re: Install from CD/???

Post by thetotalchaos »

falkTX wrote: SSE2 is particularly useful for audio software because of its "flush to zero" CPU flag.
Hi falkTX
I remember that i read this. I am not familiar what is it exactly, but is it possible this to cause random kwin restarts. My GPU is incide the CPU (Haswell).

Does anybody else had seen similar KWin (KDE Window Manager) behaviour?

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