[PD] [OT] Ubuntu Studio and other media-related distros

[august]

Derek,

wasn't it you who posted a link to "gentoo is for ricers" site on this
list years ago?  :)  (site seems to be down now)

I used to use gentoo because, for years, I had a pII 500mhz laptop with a
max of 128mb of ram.  I thought with gentoo, I would be able to slim the
memory usage down and max out the amount of mmx and sse instructions
used in code overall.   And, I remember it running really smoothly.

At one point, however, I got sick of compiling X for 2 days straight
every time that needed to be upgraded.   I also spent 3 or 4 days trying
to get it to work with a wireless card with which I was stuck.  At that
point, I installed ubuntu 5.10 (i think.  this was 2004).    In my
experience, ubuntu has been good at recognizing the most kinds of
general use hardware (wireless cards, bluetooth, openGL, usb cards and
media readers etc) so long as you use their gnome environment.   It also
has a very large selection of packages.  I stuck to the apt-get'able
packages and never had a single problem in the last 4 years.  I spent
considerably less time futzing around with various options...and learned
to live with what was there.  I was also able to mount and use normal
non-journaled HFS+ drives, although only did that on one or two
occasions when I was forced to 'think different'. 

I now have a laptop with pIII 600mhz and 256mb of ram with Ubuntu Hardy
Heron (the latest).    If you have less than a 1Gig of RAM, I would
seriously not recommend using this distro.   It was an amazing
difference in memory usage from the last distro version to this one. I
have stopped all unnecessary daemons and had to stop using the gnome
window manager and now use fluxbox...and it will still swap like
crazy every now and then.    

I'm actually considering switching back to gentoo.

-august.


> Hey gang,
> 
> In a search for distraction from the project I'm really supposed to be 
> working on, I decided to update my (until now stable but very outdated) 
> Gentoo media editing machine. A couple days of circular package blocks, 
> missing dependencies and vanishing libraries later, I'm really curious 
> why I once decided it was a good idea to compile everything myself ;-) 
> (Note to Gentooers: "emerge --update --deep world" once a month, or get 
> the thing stable and never touch it again! If you wait too long, and 
> your current packages go out of Portage, it can be hellish!).
> 
> So if and when this machine is hosed, what would be a good distro to put 
> on it? I don't feel much like the super-hacker I was a four or five 
> years ago when I got into Gentoo, but I like a distro that I can 
> configure to be extremely minimal and transparent. And what is 
> absolutely necessary is that it has well-configured versions of all the 
> audio softs that I depend on, such as Ardour (w/ VST support!), Jamin, 
> LADSPAs, JACK, etc. Realtime/prempt kernel = A-OK. Ability to use 
> PD-Extended is of course a plus, and also the ability to mount HFS+ 
> drives without destroying them (as Ubuntu has done to me in the past) is 
> also necessary.
> 
> I looked at Ubuntu Studio, but I wanted to ask who actually uses it. 
>  From the page it seems like maybe it's not well-maintained, and that's 
> another requirement for me after messing around with different 
> audio-related overlays for Portage that eventually get abandoned.
> 
> If Ubuntu Studio isn't the right one, can anyone suggest another option? 
> My last criteria is that it has a coherent user community and excellent 
> docs (strongest point of Gentoo, and from what I recall a weak point of 
> straight Debian, IMHO).
> 
> thx + best!
> D.