[Ardour-Users] ardour & "phoning home"

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday, August 10, 2010 06:29:38 am Simon Wise wrote:
> On 09/08/10 23:45, Ross Johnson wrote:
> > Given that it is possible to download [from the Ardour site] a MacOS
> > binary for Ardour, but Linux has to be built from source and therefore
> > provides more opportunity to turn phone-home off, this is very likely to
> > bias the usage stats heavily in favour of MacOS.

> It is actually easier to install Ardour on Linux than OSX, it is maintained in 
> Debian and probably several other distributions, typing one line:

Fedora is another where Ardour is quite well supported; Orcan Ogetbil is doing a good job maintaining its packages and keeping the versions up to date.  Fedora is however a rolling release product, with only three releases supported at any given time.  If you stay up to date (which is easier now than it used to be thanks to continual improvements in the yum package management frontend to the rpm database and to careful packaging, as well as the preupgrade script allowing an inplace upgrade to occur) you'll get reasonably up to date Ardour (Fedora 13, which I'm running, has Ardour 2.8.11 currently in updates).  I've used Ubuntu (for a couple of years), and have found that Fedora's upgrade process is more stable and easier in the main.  

For audio apps I found the versions of Ubuntu I used were very unstable and nearly unusable, and to get up to date Ardour required either a major version upgrade or a PPA; PPA's have their own problems.  Granted, I only used 7.10, 8.04LTS, 8.10, and 9.04, but I found them all lacking in stability on my hardware.  F11 through F13 has been stable thus far; but prior to buying mixbus and getting OS X I was using AVLinux for Ardour.  So I can't really comment on how stable Ardour has been on recent Fedora since I've not used it heavily.  Even then, I always rebuild it from the source RPM and disable the SYSLIBS option; that has typically improved stability of Ardour. 

The PlanetCCRMA repository has a JACK2 package that works well, as well as the rt kernel and other bits needed for low-latency operation. 

However, I'm a mixbus user, which means, until a Linux version of at least the harrision channel strip plugin is available for Fedora, I'm a OS X user when doing audio.  I would prefer a Linux version of Mixbus, or at least the channel strip LADSPA plugin (I can rebuild from the svn source easily enough), even if that meant no real support from Harrison for a Linux install.

But, no, I'm sorry, installation of Ardour or Mixbus on OS X is simpler than the installation on even a modern Linux, since there really isn't an installation, per se, on OS X thanks to the app structure OS X uses.  JACK installation is of about the same difficulty on both platforms.

Just my two cents.