[PD] linux distribution choice

[julienbreval at free.fr]

Hello list

I have a laptop now (Pentium M 1.72 GHz) and there's a void partition waiting
for a Linux install. I want to use it for real time audio processing (Pure
Data) and a few other things that are not very important here (Ardour, Scilab,
Firefox, etc). After a quick look at the usual Internet places, I'm quite
confused about distribution choice.

As I have some good experience of Red Hat 9 (the Planet CCRMA version) on a
desktop, I investigated Fedora but according to what I read it looks quite big,
complicated and slow because it would like to resemble Windows or OS X. I don't
need so a lot of things and I have always believed that simple things work
better. Maybe I'm wrong ...

Conversely, I don't want to loose time on technical things because I need to
focus on music, so building my own distribution (or starting from Gentoo) is
not possible (though really interesting) because it would take about 3 months
or so. And maybe I don't need so specific complex tweaking for only doing
realtime audio.

Some Linux distributions like Ubuntu seem to be a compromise between big linux
and scratch linux but last time I tried Ubuntu I couldn't get correct low
latency audio on it, hence I re-installed RH9. Did these medium-size
distributions improve recently ?

There are also some "multimedia" linux like Agnula that I don't know anything
about.

So which distribution would you recommand ? I need something efficient,
performant for audio (I have a hdsp sound card that will help a lot), generic,
that doesn't need 1 year of tweaking before working. The RH9 Planet CCRMA
version was good and it included APT (mandatory). But things have changed and
we are nearly in 2006 ... what if I would like to do a new track tomorrow ? :)


Thanks for your information

Regards
Julien Breval