Yet another "which distro" thread

OK, so my beloved FirePod died somewhere between my last gig and our studio…

With the need to get a new interface, I decided to go PCI and get a Delta 1010LT.

Then I figured what the heck – why not rebuild my machine too, since I’ve been fighting little problems with my BCF2000 and Ardour2 (I think there might be some issues with my USB/sound configs…)

I’ve been using FC5 with PlanetCCRMA all along, and I’m pretty happy, but then I came across the Jacklab Audio Distribution (JAD) last night while I was poking around. Is anyone here using the distro? It looks like it might be right up my alley – based on Open Suse (I’m a former Suse user), pre-packaged audio apps, and realtime kernel, lightweight options for the window manager (also pre-packaged)… so on and so forth.

Since I’m not familiar with it’s reputation, I thought I’d see what other are thinking about it these days.

Thanks! Ryan

I dont know anything about this distro. Try it and find out… and let everyone know :slight_smile:
I use Gentoo. I’ve used other distros before… I’m happy with Gentoo simply because of the challenges dealing with dependencies in other distros. The other distros may be different or easier now, I’m not really sure.

With Gentoo, its easy enough to “emerge --sync” and “emerge --world” to keep it current.
( the recommended commands are a little different than this… but not much)
Gentoo not overly “bleeding” edge and at the same time, fairly stable. If you encounter an issue, its easy enough to look in their forums and sure enough somebody else will have experienced the same issue.

The community has nice how-tos and wiki to install different parts Ardour needs, such as ALSA and jackd. and Kernel upgrades are fairly straight forward, too. Hope my $0.02 is helpful. :slight_smile:

regards

kelargo,
how it works in gentoo to get a proper rt-kernel?

do you compile yourself?

cheers,
doc

I had success with emerge ardour-2.0.5 and my kernel has different rt settings enabled. yes, I build my kernel…

$ uname -a Linux mybox 2.6.22-gentoo-r5 #4 SMP Tue Sep 4 06:50:16 CDT 2007 i686 Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 3.20GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

is that what you are asking? … or building ardour myself?

I’m just trying to install ardour with scons … that’s not 100% success for me, yet.
Its a work in progress… learning how to build.

FYI: I just found this resource… looks helpful

http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

gotta recommend arch linux here :slight_smile:

FYI – I spent several hours this weekend trying out the Jacklab distro. I didn’t really put it through any real heavy lifting, but out of the box, it looks pretty functional. I’m an enlightenment fan, so the default to E17 is a positive for me, but might be everyone’s cup of tea…

So then I decided to install (read: compile) some little utils and apps that I like. It appears that the JAD install doesn’t come with make, autoconf, or even a usable cc or gcc to be found. Either the stuff isn’t there, or there are really serious environment/path issues by default. I’m sure it could all be worked around, but I don’t have time to monkey around with dependency-hell, just to get a functional build environment.

So the lesson learned is this: Jacklab looks nice, and appears to be ready-to-run for audio, but little else. If you want to try it, don’t go for the DVD ISO – install Opensuse 10.2, then apply the JAcklab “overlay” to get the realtime audio stuff.

For my part, I didn’t want to deal with all that, so I just went back to FC7 and PlanetCCRMA, which always worked for me.