[PD] OT : Ubuntu/Fedora opinions (relative to Pd, of course)

[Roman Haefeli]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 11:26 +0800, Lao Yu wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> since the release of F9 I look at the audio part of Linux - I  
> personally find it a complete disaster and 'user-hostile' to be  
> polite. Many on this list are software specialists, so please don't  
> look down on someone who doesn't want to follow 3 pages of  
> instructions of how to make pulse audio work 'on top of' ALSA -  
> especially if there are follow-ups on the relevant forums that they  
> still don't have any signal output.
> My laptop currently runs F9 (or WinXP) and works is an mp3 player,  
> full stop. From posts on the fedora list I understand that my  
> situation is even better than many others who don't even get that to  
> work.
> My question is, how does Ubuntu studio compare to Fedora? Before I  
> start doctoring with my laptop and install Ubuntu 9.04 instead of F9  
> I'm scratching my head.
> Thanks for any comments.

you can download an ubuntu iso and burn it on cd and start it safely
from there. you will quickly see, how well your soundcard and card
configuration in your laptop is supported. personally, i don't have any
experience with fedora, but i'd say for ubuntu at least it is difficult
to make general statement. of course, the ubuntu dev team is eager to
fix as many problems as possible, but still in most cases it is simply a
matter of whether the included alsa version supports a certain
card/configuration or not. i've made very different experiences in terms
of sound working out of the box, altough most of the time it works
without tweaking. 

i found, that the jack audioserver is a lot easier to setup and
integrates much better in more recent versions of ubuntu. after starting
jack (e.g. with qjackctl), it's even possible to launch pulseaudio
automatically, so that it uses jack as the backend. this means, that
even non-jack capable applications can be captured by puredata, for
instance. 

i mention jack, because i found, that  puredata runs  quite stable with
jack and has only little dropouts. it sometimes it still works well with
jack, eventough you get a lot of 'tried but couldn't sync A/D/A'
messages and crackling noises with alsa.

before doctoring around, i really would only test your setup from a
live-cd - just to check, if you can get a workable setup in one session.
if not, and if you dislike tinkering around, then let it be, i'd say.

in order to test, if puredata & audio works for you, you need to perform
the following steps (after you launched the live-cd):
- enable the multiverse repository:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-enable-the-universe-and-multiverse-repositories-in-ubuntu-804-hardy.html
- update your apt cache: sudo aptitude update
- install pd and jack audio server:
  sudo aptitude install puredata qjackctl
- start jack: qjackctl &
- start puredata: pd -jack -channels 2

if you come that far within a reasonable amount of time, ubuntu might be
an option for you.

let us know your progess.

roman




		
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