AV Linux MX Edition 23.1 (AVL-MXe) Released!

[GMaq]

Hi!

Just sharing my Blog post of the release of AV Linux MX Edition 23.1!

http://www.bandshed.net/2024/01/14/av-l ... -released/

Best, Glen

*NOTE - An updated and revised ISO "20240120" has been uploaded addressing 2 issues: Enlightenment packagekit updater replaced with MX's 'apt-notifier'. PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol) added to expose PipeWire's Pro Audio profiles. Also Muse Sound Manager was added for MuseScore.. If you've already downloaded and installed the initial ISO then you can fix the Package updating issue with the info in this forum post:

https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=78951

You can install 'pavucontrol' through the Package Manager and the Muse Sound Manager is available here

[alex stone]

Awesome.

Thanks Glen!

[sjzstudio]

Great! I'll install it first on this home workstation and then on the studio computer, as long as I get the work in progress done there. Some things seem to have changed quite a lot. But life is a time to learn.

[sunrat]

Downloading now, will try it live tonight.
As a diehard KDE Plasma user, it will be interesting to see how I like Enlightenment. I used Bodhi for a little while but long ago.
Also interested to check out Pipewire. I had an almost successful dabble with it over a year ago but it is much more mature now.
Thanks for your passionate work @GMaq !

[16Hz]

Thanks for your wonderful and dedicated work, I very much appreciate it

[tseaver]

@GMaq

Thanks very much for the hours of hard work you put into this release!

Like you, I'm ambivalent about the switch to Pipewire, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

Firing up the Live USB, I bounced pretty hard off of some of the Enlightenment quirkiness: the one which made me shut it down and come here was the throbbing icons in the IBars: I couldn't find anywhere to turn that off! Browser searches things like "enlightenment desktop ibar animation" etc. didn't help.

I truly don't care much about tweaking the appearance / theming of the desktop, and was more or less happy with the prior release's XFCE look and feel (I hadn't changed anything that I can recall about its visual appearance). But I do care about behavioral things like key bindings, and removing "distractions" like animations, etc.

[16Hz]

I have one deal beaker which I could not overcome and would very much appreciate some advice?

The default configuration is of the consumer kind, which means stereo in and stereo out.
If you invested some money, in say an RME Babyface FS with 12 channels I/O this seems a bit of a loss.

The remedy normally is to activate the pro audio profile.
But I couldn't figure out how to do this, although before it was very easy to do this in PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol).

How do I activate the pro audio profile with pipewire alone without pavucontrol, like on the command line or otherwise?

[GMaq]

I have one deal beaker which I could not overcome and would very much appreciate some advice?

The default configuration is of the consumer kind, which means stereo in and stereo out.
If you invested some money, in say an RME Babyface FS with 12 channels I/O this seems a bit of a loss.

The remedy normally is to activate the pro audio profile.
But I couldn't figure out how to do this, although before it was very easy to do this in PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol).

How do I activate the pro audio profile with pipewire alone without pavucontrol, like on the command line or otherwise?

I foresaw this being an issue so if you look in ~/.config/wireplumber/main.lua.d/ there is a text file called "lua_example" containing the following instructions:

Code: Select all

#Setting up a device not recognized correctly for the PipeWire "Pro Audio" profile.

1. Get your Device ID from 'wpctl status' (Focusrite Clarett used as example).

$ wpctl status
Audio
 ├─ Devices:
 │     107. Clarett+ 2Pre                       [alsa]

2. Get your ALSA Device name.

$ wpctl inspect 107 | grep device.name
  * device.name = "alsa_card.usb-Focusrite_Clarett__2Pre_00004281-00"

3. In this folder create a text file called "51-my-alsa-config.lua" with this content and place your ALSA Device name where indicated.

table.insert(alsa_monitor.rules, {
	matches = {
		-- ORed
		{
			{ "device.name", "matches", "< Place ALSA Device name here between quotes>" },
		},
	},
	apply_properties = {
		["device.profile"] = "pro-audio",
	},
})

This worked for me with a Presonus AR-8..

Of course if you don't really need JACK all of this Audio server nonsense can be cut off at the ankles simply using the ALSA backend in your DAW, then you're connected at the driver level right to your hardware.

[GMaq]

@GMaq

Thanks very much for the hours of hard work you put into this release!

Like you, I'm ambivalent about the switch to Pipewire, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

Firing up the Live USB, I bounced pretty hard off of some of the Enlightenment quirkiness: the one which made me shut it down and come here was the throbbing icons in the IBars: I couldn't find anywhere to turn that off! Browser searches things like "enlightenment desktop ibar animation" etc. didn't help.

I truly don't care much about tweaking the appearance / theming of the desktop, and was more or less happy with the prior release's XFCE look and feel (I hadn't changed anything that I can recall about its visual appearance). But I do care about behavioral things like key bindings, and removing "distractions" like animations, etc.

Ok, I understand..

Some of this stuff is simply as you said quirks or features of Enlightenment, some of it can be turned off and some of it is baked into the Enlightenment theme, I'm asking the Enlightenment developer what the iBar options are and will see if I get a reply. Bear in mind Enlightenment's base 'EFL' libraries handle these types of things very efficiently there is virtually no memory cost for the bling.

Of course installing XFCE4 (or any other DE) is possible, I actually did a fair amount of work to make the Custom AVL stuff more DE agnostic this time in case people wanted to go back to XFCE4 although I don't really recommend it nor am I going to guide people in how to do it..

[tseaver]

@GMaq

Bear in mind Enlightenment's base 'EFL' libraries handle these types of things very efficiently there is virtually no memory cost for the bling.

I don't care (much) about the resource costs -- I object to bling trying to grab my attention away from the things that matter.

[GMaq]

Well, apparently the iBar animations are part of the default Enlightenment theme so they in particular can't be turned off.. I am personally ambivalent about them I kind of look at those sort of things and think "I guess that's how it works" and don't really give it a lot more thought but if they annoy then they annoy, not much I can do about it unfortunately..

[16Hz]

I foresaw this being an issue so if you look in ~/.config/wireplumber/main.lua.d/ there is a text file called "lua_example" containing the following instructions:

[... se above ...]

This worked for me with a Presonus AR-8..

Of course if you don't really need JACK all of this Audio server nonsense can be cut off at the ankles simply using the ALSA backend in your DAW, then you're connected at the driver level right to your hardware.

Thank you very much @GMaq, your help is very much appreciated!

I gave your instructions a short try this morning, but couldn't get them to work on first try.
Will dive into this later today again ... and edit this post accordingly ...

[Lume]

This is epic!

Thank you, @GMaq !

Can´t wait the download to finish and test pipewire.

[GMaq]

Thank you very much @GMaq, your help is very much appreciated!

I gave your instructions a short try this morning, but couldn't get them to work on first try.
Will dive into this later today again ... and edit this post accordingly ...

Actually I have just discovered there is an easier way...

For some reason Enlightenment's Mixer isn't exposing the 'Pro Audio' profile, however if you install 'pavucontrol' from MXPI or Synaptic and go to its Configuration tab that will show the profile and you can select from there.. *note the screenshot is using the 'Dark' theme but it's from AVL-MXe

shot-2024-01-17_08-49-23.jpg (144.81 KiB) Viewed 7366 times

I will be adding pavucontrol to a revised ISO in the future

[All in One Wish]

Awesome news, I kept checking to try out the new AVL-MXe

I do think it should be important (unless there are some news I do not know about) to point out that firewire devices and pipewire "work" but the latency is abysmal. I read that wtay mentioned at some point, during the release of pipewire 1.0 that they didn't have firewire hardware to play with and test.

If there are no further updates to pipewire than the 1.0 release, anyone with a firewire interface, hoping to try pipewire with the new AVL is in for a major disappointment.

Playing a software instrument, like any keyboard has a pretty noticeable latency. In that sense, for those users with a Firewire interface, AVL will only be useable if setup to use regular Jack or simply wait until wtay gets the firewire latency to equivalent to Jack's

Thank you Glenn for this release and all the hard work!!!