[Ardour-Users] best installation of ardour

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, jonathan wrote:

> I was wondering what is the best way to install ardour. Should I just
> install the package from my distro or should I download it form the
> site. If I do get it from my distro which is the best for ardour? If I
> download it from the site and there is an update for ardour is it easy
> to update or do I have to redownload the whole program again to get the
> update? Thanks for your help.

A lot of that depends on what distro you're using, but generally it's 
better to use the package management tools that are provided by your 
distro.  Those tools often make the task of resolving dependencies much 
easier.  Note that some distro maintainers take longer than others to make 
updates available, so if you need some functionality or a bug fix that's 
only available in the latest SVN build, then you might need to roll 
Ardour from source.

Many distros (Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and several others 
that I'm aware of) will run Ardour well, so your choice of distro is 
largely based on your experience and comfort level and other concerns, 
such as how easy it is to get your audio interface working with a 
particular distro.

To get the most out of Ardour, you need to have a kernel that's built for 
real-time operation, which requires either the application of a set of 
patches to your existing kernel source tree, getting an already-patched 
kernel source tree, downloading and installing a package that contains a 
pre-built kernel that includes the real-time patch cluster.  How you 
accomplish that is, again, based largely on your choice of distro.

jms