[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?

> I'll give it a try. Do you know of one for Suse? If not, I'll try DeMuDi.

I'll be interested to know what you think of this.  I've discovered some 
to me unsettling things.  Apparently DeMuDi is trying to be user friendly 
enough for Spinal Tap level musicians, because when you install the 
package it does a bunch of configuration without asking through debconf (I 
think it is).  In particular, it tries to disable some system daemons, 
notably inetd, atd, cron, anacron, and exim4.  It's probably obvious why 
it wants to do this--having a big cron job start up or exim start to chew 
through the mail queue during a recording session could cause lost audio 
frames.  Apparently DeMuDi assumes that the user is not competent enough 
to choose his own services.  To add insult to injury, it reconfigures the 
default editor to be ***nano***.

That is probably an advantage for some, but it is unacceptable to me.  It
also is dangerous in that it doesn't mention that logrotate won't ever
run, for example, and logs will slowly accumulate.  Nor that local mail
will get bounced, but I suppose they assume nobody runs their own MTA....

Anyway, I plan to back out demudi and the base cdd package it uses,
because nobody but nobody touches configuration I've already set up
without asking.  I see no reason I can't just use their package repository
to have more recent audio packages than in Sarge, which is all I really
wanted anyway.  Plus then I'll have a bit of experience with an
alternative method of obtaining the audio packages.

I'm not recommending that anyone else avoid demudi, because it will get
you a configured workstation a lot faster than you might do it yourself,
but rather just to point out a few things the docs don't mention that you
might want to know (personally, if this isn't documented it's the same as
malware to me, but feel free to think I'm an extremist--I quit using Red
Hat and similar "user friendly" distros precisely for this reason).  Also
to point out an alternative experiment (just use their repository but
don't install demudi itself) that I'll be testing.

I wouldn't be surprised if the other packages do similar things, for the
same reasons, so if anyone installs (say) Planet CCRMA I'd be interested
to hear if it shuts down system services in pursuit of ultra-low latency
without telling you.

It would be cool if we had some experience with the different packages and 
what they do by the time we have a meeting.

Dustin