[PD] PD and MacIntel

[Damian Stewart]

carmen wrote:

 > it would help if you can provide a backtrace so that these crashes can
 > be diagnosed..

Pd does say 'warning: MIDI in Windows is dangerous' on creating any MIDI 
objects, I figure everyone knows this already. Also, I don't know how to 
provide a backtrace. I would love to get my hands dirty with the PD 
source but it resolutely refuses to compile on my machine. I've tried 
four different Windows-based unix-like and non-unix-like compilation 
environments, each taking upwards of ten hours to install and experiment 
with, and have achieved not a single compile. That's forty hours of 
potential music making, and all of my spare time for three weeks, gone, 
on nothing, not to mention the stress and frustration as gig dates loom 
and I still haven't actually made any music. And it turns out during 
that that I probably ended up getting several broken CVS versions, 
instead of 'the proper one', whichever that is.

> have you tried Ubuntu Studio, Musix, Studio-to-Go, Studio64, DeMuDi, CCRMA or 
 > Dynebolic/PureDyne?

The issue isn't with Linux per se, it's my USB audio device. The 
built-in audio is gross on pretty much every PC laptop, and I just can't 
make my USB audio device go. It's a Tascam US122, which I specifically 
bought because people said good things about it working in Linux, but I 
can't make it go. (I've browsed the code, the logs, and the web trying 
to see if I can figure it out for myself, and I can't.)

Ubuntu (Hoary and Breezy) freezes my machine on boot (it's a PCMCIA 
issue but I can't work out how to disable it). I have a mostly working 
DeMuDi install which does almost everything except support my USB Audio 
/ MIDI device, although I had to roll my own kernel to get around the 
PCMCIA issue (which seemed to be causing random kernel panics on boot).

I pay through the nose for internet which doesn't make downloading 
install discs particularly fun, and to be frank given my low success 
rate in the past I've lost the enthusiasm. I have been along to an 
installfest or two but no luck there either, it seems that the kind of 
people who know how to make Linux work on a laptop just know how to 
browse the web and how trial and error works, which is what I know 
already anyway.

So yes. I have tried many Liunx distros, multiple times. (I tried my 
first distro in 1999, in fact, with Red Hat 6. Couldn't make it work 
like I wanted then, either.)  There is no silver bullet to this problem, 
that I know.

 > but if Tk is slow, and OSX is slow (they both are)

Most systems are slow, for given definitions of slow. Definitions of 
slow also have a habit of morphing over the years, so that the 
'blazingly fast' cpu of 1999 magically becomes 'slow as a dog' by 2005. 
It should be called Moore's Treadmill, and it should've been smashed to 
small pieces ten years ago. I'm getting off.

-- 
Damian Stewart
+64 27 305 4107

f r e y
live music with machines
http://www.frey.co.nz
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