Hector,

I have read your response and can only comment that I have been a user of CCRMA's version of Fedora for some time. I am not responding to place my recommendation for that distribution over Ubuntu since I only tried Ubuntu early on when it was not stable. I would like to offer my observation on what I have felt for a long time regarding to multimedia (sound) on linux.

What has made linux OS so successful is that it has a legion of volunteers willing to contribute to the cause of advancing the state of the OS for free but even more importantly, in my opinion, is the fact that Linus Torvalds has been the leader to keep those volunteers motivated while controlling/coordinating the development of the OS. He and others (what were very productive volunteers) have even figured ways to make a living at what they have done so well for free. I am unaware of any such individual (or organization) functioning similarly for multimedia-sound). My reason for choosing CCRMA and staying with it is because Fernando Lopez-Lezcano has been available, almost at moments notice, to answer and solve most of problems that I have encountered. (I don't know how he has the patients and stamina to do what he does.) I do get frustrated that I can not get my ATI graphics card to work and have to settle for a less then optimal driver for video but my major concern recently, and maybe I am wrong, is the state of soundcard drivers available for linux (particularly notebooks). I have had good luck with desktops and m-audio soundcards but with notebooks I don't have any comfort that there are cards that fully work. (This comment maybe too harsh.) Without reliable soundcard drivers, I worry that the whole elegant alsa sound system and sound applications my never achieve their full potential and may just wither and die.

I have heard some of the arguments that vendors have been non-cooperative. I do believe that there should be ways to structure an approach that would give the linux/sound community leverage over the vendor in order to get their cooperation, e.g. a non-profit organization with support from colleges and university music departments. I would like to hear if I am all wet. However, before we get too far into the new year, I had to get these thoughts off my chest. Happy New Year? And thanks to all who contribute.

John Dey

On Jan 4, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Hector Centeno wrote:

Hi again,

On Jan 3, 2008 9:04 PM, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:

...

On Thursday 03 January 2008, bH wrote:

...

Lamar Owen wrote:

The point is, once built for Ubuntu 7.10, it has to be rebuilt for 8.04, then 8.10 (or whatever), and so on; you don't gain anything going to Ubuntu, as it is just as fast moving as Fedora is in terms of support; the repo would still have to be rebuilt every six months, as packages for 7.04 may or may not work for 7.10 (and packages for 6.06 will definitely not work for 7.10 or the upcoming 8.04).

I think I disagree about this. You would gain a lot going to Ubuntu instead of Fedora. It is true that Ubuntu gets upgraded every 6 months (as Fedora does) but in Ubuntu you have the hard work of many people trying to make Linux usable and friendly and at the same time to keep it up to date, while in Fedora you get a bunch of experimental and broken things thrown to the users for beta testing. For instance, something like having and ATI graphics card working, with full 3D rendering, under Fedora 8 is almost impossible, while in Ubuntu works out of the box, or if you want to install the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu you just get them from the repository or better yet, just click on the proprietary drivers icon that pops up at the panel bar when it detects your Nvidia hardware. I know I could just download the sources and compile myself... but well, it saves time to have things planed ahead by someone who cares about usability.

Regarding the upgrading issue, I do mind having the latest version of Gnome, for example, as it usually means less bugs and better usability. As I said before, I think Linux-Audio and Linux-as-a-desktop is quite young and in development, you can't really get stuck with a buggy and underdeveloped application for too long as you might be missing a stabler and more usable system.

Just my thoughts.

Cheers!

Hector

...

But all of that is moot; PlanetCCRMA is currently an RPM repository, and the effort required for changing to be a Debian repository is significant; probably a lot harder than keeping up with Fedora (this is something I know a little bit about; I packaged PostgreSQL RPM's for Red Hat Linux and Fedora from 1999 up through 2004; I investigated Debian packaging, and it is very very different from RPM packaging. Now, nando is a very bright fellow; I have no doubts he is capable to doing that. The bigger question is whether he wants to do so.

...

Further, there are already Debian packagers for some of this; you should really talk to them about updating their versions, rather than muddy the currently well-unified repository waters for Ubuntu. That is really the major advantage over Fedora that Ubuntu has; Fedora's repositories have historically been somewhat fractured.

However, there is work ongoing to merge PlanetCCRMA RPM's into Fedora itself, which would lessen nando's work load. This I'm sure he looks forward to!

Now, the latency could be due to other things set up in the PlanetCCRMA kernel and other libs versus the Ubuntu linux-rt kernel; don't know. It would be interesting to see what the .config for the Ubuntu rt kernel looks like versus the PlanetCCRMA one.

I myself am having issues with the F8 PlanetCCRMA rt kernel; I'm running F7 on my main DAW desktop for now, but will be upgrading probably next week, as things are stable enough at this point for my uses. I'll probably forgo the rt kernel for now, as my uses currently don't require the low latency.

I for one am thrilled with what nando has been doing for the last several years; many thanks, nando! --

Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu

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