[SGVLUG] Linux Audio

[Dustin]

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Douglas Burton wrote:

> >As we speak, I'm installing the DeMuDi (Debian Music Distribution)  
> >packages on top of Sarge.  Is anyone brave/foolish enough to want to
> >install the equivalent for their distro?  (Planet CCRMA for Fedora,
> >Audioslack for Slackware, etc.)  If so, it would be sort of useful if you
> >try it before the meeting and can give us an idea of how it went.  Or, if
> >you want to try it in public or aren't sure how, we might be able to to
> >help you do it at this proposed meeting.  Any takers?
> >
> I'll give it a try. Do you know of one for Suse? If not, I'll try DeMuDi.

I don't know of one for Suse.  There are some people using it, since I've
seen it mentioned on linux-audio-users, but I believe they went it alone
with some combination of the versions shipped with Suse and just building
from source.  Some of the key programs are developing rapidly, and a lot
of people seem to be building from CVS (demudi's hydrogen drum machine
package is obviously CVS, for example).  If you do that with too many
things maybe a package won't help.

Gentoo doesn't have a separate package either, but it seems to be a
special case--by design it is configurable enough to turn it into a DAW
fairly easy without going outside the main distro, so it almost counts as
a multimedia distro already.  I guess the Gentoo design does do what it
was intended to do.

A couple of DeMuDi notes for Sarge:

One small annoyance I've found with DeMuDi: it decided to play with my 
/etc/alternatives settings, which I don't think it has any business 
touching.  Splash screen and login screen, well, maybe, but changing
/etc/alternatives/editor to ***nano*** of all things is a criminal 
offense. :-)

Also, it is evolving into a general audio/video multimedia distro, which
makes sense I guess, but it means that in addition to upgrading your music
apps and providing a low-latency kernel, it really wishes you'd
dist-upgrade so it can install xorg with the new graphics features, and a
new glibc (presumably xorg or something else needs this).  I didn't feel
anything like that adventurous, so I stuck with upgrading individual
packages I am already using.  I didn't even use tasksel as the
instructions suggest, since I don't like tools that want to do that much
work on autopilot.  Maybe later.

That's probably just on Sarge--if you're on Sid you already have xorg and
probably a later glibc too.  The result on Sarge seems to be an
interesting hybrid: a conservative base system with a somewhat bleeding
edge audio portion.

Dustin