A lot of distro's... which do you prefer?

[studio32]

The first poll on the forum :)

Give your vote and your opinion.


The links to the distro's and the download mirrors you can find at:

http://apps.linuxaudio.org/apps/categor ... tributions

[studio32]

I'm using now my own system, Debian mixed lenny/sid

I've tried musix, ubuntustudio and 64studio.

I do prefer 64studio although the other 2 where quit ok as well...

If your are a newbie in linux audio world, I would advice you ubuntu studio or 64studio (which is also for 32bit)

[Tim]

I prefer Ubuntu Studio myself. It's (I think) the distro with the biggest user support group and that's nice if you're a starter.

And it's quite stable and looks good. Heard very good things about 64 studio though. But I'll stick to Ubuntu Studio..

[studio32]

I prefer Ubuntu Studio myself. It's (I think) the distro with the biggest user support group and that's nice if you're a starter.

And it's quite stable and looks good. Heard very good things about 64 studio though. But I'll stick to Ubuntu Studio..

I found this in the linuxaudio.org mailingarchive about ubuntu

Code: Select all

There's a caveat with Ubuntu (and derivs like Studio) and jack though:
the jack pcm plugin for alsa is not included. You can get this enabled
by rebuilding the appropriate pkg (libasound2-plugins) though.

My personal opinion on this is that's a flaw in the design of the
distro. I'm sure the Ubuntu maintainers have their reasons, but the
Studio derivs also not enabling it tells me its not as good as it
could be.

If you don't have a  need for that pcm plugin, or are willing to
rebuild libasound2-plugins pkg to include it, by all means, check the
distro out. I liked it for most of the things I used it for, until I
came across the jack pcm plugin limitation.

Oh, under Ubuntu Gutsy, if you rebuild libasound2-plugins to include
jack pcm, there's a bug in alsa (assertion failure or similar) that
crashes the thread or app trying to use jack pcm plugin. Seems to be
an issue with resampling.

After trying all this on the above, I simply went to Debian testing
(lenny, which Ubuntu is based on). They include the jack pcm plugin,
and alsa doesnt exhibit the assertion failure I experienced under
Gutsy.

My understanding, though untested, is that alsa bug is fixed in
Ubuntu's upcoming Hardy Heron release, but Hardy still doesnt include
the jack pcm plugin by default.

Hope that helps....

and

Code: Select all

Having the plugin enables you to use non-jack aware audio apps to use jack.
You can create pcm devices in your .asoundrc that invoke the jack pcm
plugin, and configure the non-jack aware app to use the specific pcm
you set. All of this of course assumes you're using the jack audio
connection kit.

I don't know if this relates to your situation and HArdy is coming soon...
Ubuntu is great for newbies (and others), sure!

[thorgal]

pulseaudio will replace all this. And that's good news for non professional usage of audio soft via Jack. Leave Jack to pro work, it's too sensitive to hardware / kernel tuning, etc. Pulseaudio on the other hand will provide the flexibility and ease of use sorta out of the box, and for general purposes.

[raboof]

There's a caveat with Ubuntu (and derivs like Studio) and jack though: the jack pcm plugin for alsa is not included.

The details about this issue are here.

Personally I'm using plain Ubuntu. All the Ubuntu Studio work is also available in Ubuntu itself, see here.

[Tim]

Didn't know that Studio 32, thanks for sharing with us! Never had big problems not using it though, but I'll install that pcm thing..

[schivmeister]

Pre-packaged platforms aren't my cup of tea, so I stick to meta-distribs. Initially was Gentoo, now I'm completely settled with Arch since I started going mobile (desktop has been unused for some time now)

I have 64Studio as a LiveCD for some special situations, and IMHO it's the most stable of the lot.

btw: Planet CCRMA is _not_ a distro per se

[james=jwm//art@net]

I use debian stable because there is no possibility for me to download any distribution or connect to the net through linux - and debian stable comes on three DVD's.

I don't use any of the audio/music/sound packages however. I download the source and compile it myself.

Unfortunately, the latest software (and it's some time since a new debian distro release) requires the latest libs, so I've had to compile glib, gtk, etc to use the latest ardour2 releases - but it all works fine

I'm no proffesional, but I thought JACK is the only way, I've never used pulseaudio, or even arts. And JACK does work, even on a heap of **** abit/via/unichrome system like I have. (You should see the internal compiler errors which happen when I compile ardour due to hardware memory errors.)

[metasymbol]

I use JAD, is it a wonder?

But I also have an installation of 64studio on my DAW - for testing proposes. 64studio is very nice, fast, stable, but based on debian -which means you need a lot of skills for configuring the system. 64studio is for the advanced power user.

I also tested ubuntustudio, which is a joke for me.

[raboof]

I also tested ubuntustudio, which is a joke for me.

Any particular reason?

[metasymbol]

I also tested ubuntustudio, which is a joke for me.

Any particular reason?

Ubuntustudio is a "me-too" product of Canonical, after they realized, that there is openSUSE JackLab. Canonical use the debian repositories, but they have made nearly no contributions for the Linux community. Ubuntustudio only seemed to be the work of the community, but at least Canonical decide. And they make stupid technical decisions.
The artwork of Ubuntustudio looks like Vista.

Take a look to 64studio, and you know what I mean.

It is sad, that everybody think Ubuntu is Linux. Ubuntu is only a very successful freeloader with a big marketing. Ok, they made a Gnome theme. Now everybody think that desktops are brown.

thats my " 2 cents " - my personal think about and no official statement.

[schivmeister]

Hah. Chill out mate, that just looks like it from the outside yeah. It's true that it's something like a "hey me too!" thing but at the end of the day, we can't argue that the "community" matters. Ubuntu has a significant part to play and all the little issues here and there are just part and parcel of free software. When you have a big entity being active it's only natural outsiders count you as THE representative.

Anyway, never tried Ubuntustudio so I can't comment. Tried JackLab but it crashed in the most critical of times during a live session (which I took over for a friend). It's normal for all-in-one platforms to behave abnormally sometimes.

[studio32]

Thanks to Ubuntu I started using Linux. There is a nice and active ubuntu community in The Netherlands and they're doing a good job and we can learn from them:
http://www.ubuntu-nl.org/
http://forum.ubuntu-nl.org/
http://www.ubuntu-nl.org/documentatie/

Also from the way they've set up there forum and the way they try and keep a very positive atmosphere.

I also tried 64studio and I think it worked better than ubuntu studio.. but maybe ubuntu is a bit easier to configure...

[metasymbol]

keep a very positive atmosphere.

For sure Ubuntu helps a lot of people to get into Linux, but it is not a "easy to use" distro - Mandriva and openSUSE have graphical configuration tools for nearly every aspect of the system -Ubuntu not.

Yes, the Ubuntu community forums are great and an example for other distributions (finally openSUSE will start a common web based user forum after years of discussions about it).

And yes, at the end the community matters. Maybe one day Ubuntu is the only distro surviving the evolutionary process. But not because Ubuntu is "better" or more userfriendly -only because they have a better marketing and a charismatic leader for the masses.