[ardour-users] Recommended distros

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Wed Jan 11 09:04:01 PST 2006


On 1/11/06, Ruben Lopez <rl1205 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Greetings everyone... my first post to this group...
>
> I have been following the development of Ardour for over a year, and
> I've decided to jump in and convert my mobile rig (AMD 2000XP, 2 Delta
> 1010s, currently running WinXP/Sonar 4) to Linux/Ardour. I know that the
> Ardour website recommends Fedora, but I would like to hear from other
> Ardour users - what is your favorite distro to host Ardour? And I
> suppose just as importantly, what is your least favorite distro, or the
> one you had the most problem with?
>
>
> Ruben

Hi Ruben,
   Welcome!

(Note to the casual reader: Ruben contacted me the other day and it
turns out we went to high school together many, many, many years ago!)

   Depending on the amount of experience you have with Linux in
general, and depending on how much flexibility you want to have with
the system overall (i.e. - hardcore browsing, Internet media, local
email instead of web-based, etc.) I think you would really want to
look at one of the two prepackaged music-oriented distros -
PlanetCCRMA or DeMudi. The Planet is based on Fedora. It has a great
mailing list, lots of folks use it, and most important is run by a
genius in these sorts of things, the infamous and amazingly helpful
Fernando Lopez-Lezcano.

   Demudi is based on Debian which I have no experience in at all. I
understand Demudi is very good also but I know nothing of the people
or the mailing lists. Check it out if you like the Debian mind set.

   There are some more music oriented, pre-built distros emerging -
one based on Ubuntu, another on openSuse called JAD (jacklab.net I
think) and another that a member her named Russ Hanaghan is involved
with. Unfortunately I do not remember that one's name at the moment.
I've downloaded JAD but haven't tried an install.

   My normal day-to-day music distro is Gentoo running on an AMD64
box. It has been my favorite so far but I ran the Planet for at least
2-3 years before starting with Gentoo, and then really only because I
was kicking Windows out of my daily life and needed more than a
precompiled distro was going to give me easily. I was always VERY
happy with the Planet distro for my music stuff and it's better now
than when I left. Gentoo is far more work though so don't go there
unless you have a reason. My son still runs the Planet on his school
machine.

   Note that ALL of these can be set up to be dual boot so that you
don't have to give up Sonar just yet. I ran Pro Tools and Ardour
side-by-side for over a year before I eventually sold the Pro Tools
rig. That said there are still many, many things I just cannot do in
Ardour or Linux MIDI apps that are a breeze on Pro Tools and Sonar.
Keep Sonar running for a while longer yet.

   Hope this helps, and welcome.

Cheers,
Mark



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