unarmedman wrote:But what's with the alliteration?

Maybe I'll just wait for the "Vivid Vasectomy"

Those of you who are into Linux and the erotic avant-garde...

I couldn't help myself.

I don't think many of the bedroom engineer demograph who visit this forum will use anything other than OSX or windows for audio work. That's their loss now, and our loss when they realise that their digital audio records are inaccessible. There's probably a few more of us using open platforms like linux/BSD for net stuff tho.

FWIW, as far as desktops go, I feel obliged to speak up on behalf of SUSE 10.0 - okay, it uses an rpm system rather than debs, but in every other regard, it is a wonderfully engineered, solid platform, providing similar portability of function and data to the also quite beautiful Ubuntu. I use both systems at work and home, and at worst I can only level trivial criticisms at them - minor UI issues, smaller hardware compatibilty base, stuff like that.
I intermittently make OS noises on this forum, as a "linux" forum search will reveal, and I'm inclined to think that 99% of the forums users either don't care - fair enough - or miss the point of the case for using an open platform. When members of that 99% try linux/BSD/etc they usually come away dissatisfied because aspects of the platform don't fit with the behaviours/characteristics they see in their other (main) platform - they want to see M$'s banquet of software titles, or Apple's "polish". Threads like this pop up too infrequently, IMO, I really think it's a topic (a niche topic, sure) that needs more visibilty for the benefits it provides.

In terms of recording software, Ardour really strikes me as being too deriviatve of the overly-busy protools workflow, which can potentially lead to difficulties extracting the metadata, from an archival perspective, because you can end up with sound distilled from a digital session file that looks like a bloody christmas tree, with ninety different trinkets dripping from the branches. I think it's almost like putting a curious kid alone in the NASA control-room and saying "don't touch anything". Personally, I think there's a great case to be made for using some of the more stripped-back recording/editing programs like SND - do away with the 6 million buttons and get the desired result by focusing on delivering a representative performance of the sound by the artist in the first place - none of the "fix it in the mix" approach. This way tends to leave simpler multi-track project files, which is a universally good thing, and increases the chance that the data will still be accessible in X years time.

My 2c -

Hmmm...I'm still trying to decide what distribution I should choose for my not-yet-purchased laptop. I've been looking at suse 10.1 today, and it looks pretty decent. Now, I've used opensuse before and was not such a fan.

As with other distributions, there always is something wrong with wireless support! But it's probably been a good 8-10 months since I tried suse last. It was Suse 9.0 then.
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edit: I also wanted to add that I prefer Gnome over KDE, and YasT was a pain in my AssT. Ubuntu's hardware configuration manager seems much more user-friendly.
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The commercial version claims to come with commercial drivers; according to the site they're mostly for "wlan cards and softmodems". I'm curious - does that mean that the commercial release of Suse has more support for wireless devices than opensuse?

The scenario I don't want to get in is the same scenario that I've had with my other computers where I've tried free distributions of Linux - I ALWAYS have to sacrifice some piece of hardware in the end. Such as "hey this distro works with my video card! But oh well, no touchpad" or "My wireless doesn't work, but my wired ethernet works, and so does my touchpad, but I can't plug a mouse in." And so on.

Would this be less likely to happen under a commercial release? Any thoughts?

Unarmedman:

The pay-for-it commercial version of SuSE does support a much wider range of hardware, I'll go so far as to say that you have to go out of your way to find hardware it won't run.

I've been using SuSE 10 and 10.1 extensively in recent times, generally with gnome, and I've found 10 overall a nicer, more functional distro, mainly due to the fact that the package manager works with 3rd-party repositories (the ones with juicy stuff on them) whereas the zen-daemon based package manager in 10.1 is a broken work-in-progress.
10.1 has some very nice desktop polish - beagle is just awesome - but I don't run it at home anymore. I look foward to 10.2.

In the near future tho, I think I'll end up running ubuntu - canonical are just a flat-out nicer bunch of people than novell, and I really like Dapper Drake. For a neat little interweb/mail/media box, ubuntu is brilliant. I don't think linux is the king-of-the-hill for all tasks, but for most common applications it whips ass.

I have Ubuntu linux running on my blue & white G3. Works great as a file/web/mail server.

juice wrote:Boy, I sure would like to insert my dongle into her SCSI female part and upload my data at a high baud rate. As long as she doesn't ask to use that gender bender in my port 0 I am cool.

Best. Post. Ever.

skinny honkie wrote:I don't think many of the bedroom engineer demograph who visit this forum will use anything other than OSX or windows for audio work. That's their loss now, and our loss when they realise that their digital audio records are inaccessible. There's probably a few more of us using open platforms like linux/BSD for net stuff tho.

FWIW, as far as desktops go, I feel obliged to speak up on behalf of SUSE 10.0 - okay, it uses an rpm system rather than debs, but in every other regard, it is a wonderfully engineered, solid platform, providing similar portability of function and data to the also quite beautiful Ubuntu. I use both systems at work and home, and at worst I can only level trivial criticisms at them - minor UI issues, smaller hardware compatibilty base, stuff like that.
I intermittently make OS noises on this forum, as a "linux" forum search will reveal, and I'm inclined to think that 99% of the forums users either don't care - fair enough - or miss the point of the case for using an open platform. When members of that 99% try linux/BSD/etc they usually come away dissatisfied because aspects of the platform don't fit with the behaviours/characteristics they see in their other (main) platform - they want to see M$'s banquet of software titles, or Apple's "polish". Threads like this pop up too infrequently, IMO, I really think it's a topic (a niche topic, sure) that needs more visibilty for the benefits it provides.

In terms of recording software, Ardour really strikes me as being too deriviatve of the overly-busy protools workflow, which can potentially lead to difficulties extracting the metadata, from an archival perspective, because you can end up with sound distilled from a digital session file that looks like a bloody christmas tree, with ninety different trinkets dripping from the branches. I think it's almost like putting a curious kid alone in the NASA control-room and saying "don't touch anything". Personally, I think there's a great case to be made for using some of the more stripped-back recording/editing programs like SND - do away with the 6 million buttons and get the desired result by focusing on delivering a representative performance of the sound by the artist in the first place - none of the "fix it in the mix" approach. This way tends to leave simpler multi-track project files, which is a universally good thing, and increases the chance that the data will still be accessible in X years time.

My 2c -

I've been sort of nonchalantly looking for a decent excuse to make the switch to Linux/Unix, just to support the open source concept. Not to mention that it seems like a great system.

I also like the idea of simple diskbased recording...as a habit from the analog days, I typically use the PC like a tape deck, except for some practical processing I couldn't otherwise afford (12 compressors, for example).

I want to build a decent media server. However, I will want to game on it (can't stop playing Civilzation 4) from time to time too. I believe this limits my choices...

I tried out a Live CD of Dapper Drake last night on my old P4 1.7 GHz desktop. It actually recognized my wireless card! I was really liking the interface, but I did have trouble configuring the wireless support at first.

It doesn't seem to support WPA encryption. What's w/that?

Aside from that (and that's a BIG that), it worked just fine.

bump.

i'm planning to build a sort of ultimate electronic music processing computer (and recording as well, i suppose), something to rival the macpro, but with a linux environment. but, it's hard as hell to figure out compatibility issues without actually buying anything..

are there any suggestions as to which breed of linux to run to? i like the idea of SuSE's hardware support, but even still, the Intel S5000PSL motherboard looks to be only supported on their Enterprise Server software (which is about 10x the price of standard).

Also, it seems like most of the graphics cards on NewEgg are either overclocked (something i don't think i want to deal with), too expensive, or too wimpy.

Any suggestions for an online store to shop from that focuses on linux compatibility?




Oh, and bash. fuck csh

Yeah I'm all about bash as well.

Are you looking for a pci-e or agp graphics card? Newegg (as well as most places now) is increasingly lacking in its stock of agp cards. Pricewatch.com might be a better place, as it pools from multiple hardware sales sites.

Also, as far as discovering Linux compatibility, newegg seems to be the best as they usually list all supported OS's. It's not perfect, but many times will be corrected in the user comments if its not right in the specs.

For your purposes, you might be interested in the musix distribution:

http://www.musix.org.ar/en/index.html

I read about it in one of this month's linux mags, and it seems to have a lot of the music hardware support configured "out of the box" (such as JACK, ALSA, etc.) and a good deal of music programs already installed.