I was adamant that I was going to follow Fred's examples using a Linux-native synth so I was hoping to use my fave, TAL Noisemaker. Unfortunately, Noisemaker lacked a couple of features required to follow all the examples to the letter and so too did every other Linux synth including the excellent commercial synth Loomer Aspect. It is very likely possible to create a dual osc, sub synth with every required feature to perform all the exercises in the book using ALSA Modular Synth or Puredata but doing so is beyond the ability of synth novices and hence most readers of this book.
All Linux native options (except zyn/Yoshimi which I didn't evaluate because its oversized interface is totally unusable on my netbook) exhausted, my only other option to follow along with the book was to get the included SCB synth running via wine which most Linux users will be aware lets you run Windows software under Linux. To save any other non-Windows users interested in this book the hassle and research, heres how I got the SCB synth running under Linux via wine.
First you need to make sure you have wine installed. I have got SCB synth running well using the wine 1.4.1 packages that are now in the Debian 7 (Wheezy) repositories so to install that I simply had to run as root:
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apt-get install wine
Using a full-blown DAW such as Reaper is overkill if all you want to do is access and use a single VSTi such as SCB synth so I have opted for and had good results with SAVIHost which you can download from:
http://www.hermannseib.com/programs/savihostx86.zip
Within that zip file is savihost.exe. The simplest way to run SCB synth is to extract savihost.exe into the same folder as the SCB synth dll file (see CDROM included with book), which you may as well rename to savihost.dll as the executable name of savihost has to match the name of the dll plugin you want to run so running SCB synth would be a case of running:
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wine savihost.exe
It would be nice if any future updates to this book were more friendly to the increasing amount of non-MS computer users as this workaround using wine is not possible if you're running Linux (or another OS) on a non-Intel CPU such as ARM or PPC - then this guide would become truly universal and able to reach the widest possible audience.
NB I did try SCB synth under festige before going for the 'pure wine' route described above. festige loaded it OK but I was getting lots of xruns and I failed to get MIDI input working with it, despite my keyboard being supposedly connected to festige according to qjack. I also tried to get dssi-vst working so I might be able to load it into qtractor but I dunno what voodoo GMaq has pulled off to get dssi-vst working as it does under AVL? Regardless, I'm happy enough to just stick with using savihost for this purpose as its only for educational purposes anyway.