openmamba

[eric71]

I recently borked my Chakra/Archaudio installation and decided to do a little distro-hopping while I wait for the next Chakra release. My main requirements are a realtime kernel and wineasio, with which I run Reaper. I've also come to prefer KDE (although I know it's heavy for audio work). I was almost settled on Debian Squeeze with a Pengutronix realtime kernel as of last night. Today at work in searching for a wineasio package, I came across openmamba. It's an Italian (though they have English iso's) RPM based distro that uses apt and Synaptic with a KDE desktop. Similar to PCLinuxOS, which I used to use when they had a RT kernel available. It seems that openmamba comes with a RT kernel and uses jack by default. Their stable release still has KDE 3.5, but their weekly build has 4.3.4. It seems to have a lot of good audio apps in the repository (even not so common stuff like jack-azr3 and the latest wineasio). I've burned the weekly build (it was 705 megs, so required overburn) and will give it a go tonight and report back. Smaller projects with a few developers always worry me as far as longevity goes, but this one is intriguing. Definitely one of the developers must be into linux music production. Maybe someone else can check it out before I get a chance:

http://www.openmamba.org/info.html

[eric71]

I tested it out. The install went ok, with a lengthy added base install step via the internet after the first boot that I would have skipped if I had known it would take so long. Otherwise the distro looks nice. It does have a RT kernel and jack and qjackctl along with appropriate limits.conf by default. I had problems with wicd and my wireless (which I always do) and there was no graphical frontend for networkmanager available. And although wineasio installed and registered properly, and Reaper showed it as an option, I still got errors that my sound was not setup correctly - so something is a bit off with the wineasio package. I dindn't spend much longer before jumping back to squeeze which I'm using now. Although it didn't quite work out for me, I'd certainly recommend trying it especially if you are using mainly native linux apps. Looks like a nice distro.

[funkmuscle]

Chakra is nice but the main Arch is the one for me... openmamba was ok? I'll try it on a 20 drive I got lying around...