Re: [Rosegarden-user] absolute beginner question

[tim h. <te...@gl...>]

On Monday 03 July 2006 21:17, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas was like:
> On Monday, 3 July 2006 20:42, tim hall wrote:
> > On Monday 03 July 2006 17:46, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas was like:
> > > If you are an absolute beginner, perhaps it would be easier for you to
> > > switch to a newbie friendly distribution.
> >
> > Are you being ironic Pedro?-)
>
> No, I'm not. He defined himself as an "absolute beginner". Put yourself
> into his skin, and then read the instructions from
> http://ubuntustudio.com/wiki/index.php/Dapper:Studio_Preparation
> and tell me if you would do it without swearing a drop.

I see your point, it's not exactly ootb, but I think mostly if the 
instructions were de-jargonified a bit they might not seem quite so scary, 
they admit "Ubuntu is not quite ready to replace a specialized distro like 
DeMuDi yet, but we're getting close!" themselves. Input from some articulate 
newbies right now could really help them sort it out. I guess I'm suggesting 
baptism by full immersion, which is not for everyone, granted, but I don't 
think it is necessary to mollycoddle newbies. The price of freedom usually 
involves a certain amount of DIY.

> As a minimum, you should:
> - configure real-time support
> - configure ALSA sequencer at start up
> and install applications and plugins, of course. All this to get a system
> that:
> - has a system timer configured to 250 Hz, which is inadequate for MIDI.

Agreed.

> - <quote>Dapper's kernel has CONFIG_PREEMPT enabled, which gives better
> results, but still not the best results. However, some preemption support
> is better than none.</quote>

You should still be able to run a reasonable Rosegarden session with this.

> - And at the end, if you find that the kernel latency still sucks, you may
> want to build your own patched vanilla kernel with the provided
> explanations. While you are compiling things, you may want to download DSSI
> and Rosegarden sources, and compile all yourself. Next step: Gentoo (here
> you are, irony! :) Mark Shuttleworth

This is the Debian way, it is nothing like as full-on as Gentoo, you can 
decide exactly how far down the recompiling path you want to go and 
rebuilding your kernel is one of the things, like package management, that 
Debian makes surprisingly easy. if you're a newbie you can ignore all that 
and face it when you are ready. That said, just changing the timer resolution 
and recompiling wouldn't actually be that difficult. ;)

> > I fully understand your reservations about Ubuntu, personally I would
> > recommend DeMuDi for music making, but realistically I think it would be
> > better to go hassle the Ubuntu developers as the intention is that Ubuntu
> > should be Newbie and to a certain extent Musician friendly. Switching
> > distros doesn't help the distro maintainers sort these problems out in
> > the long term.
>
> I agree. I'm not planing to be an Ubuntu user, but anyone else should try
> to write Mark Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu development team. Perhaps some
> day they fix the distro, or Ubuntustudio become a full distro. Meanwhile,
> if you want to make music and you are an absolute beginner, you may want to
> try another distro.

Yes, OK. I don't want to argue the merits of various distros and this 
discussion isn't likely to help to cyrill's immediate problem. If Ubuntu is 
the same as Debian, then adding snd-seq-midi to /etc/modules should do the 
trick.
-- 
cheers,

tim
/|\
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim
http://www.bardic.org

-- 
cheers,

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim
We are the people We've been waiting for.