I'd like to use Linux but...

they must be confused by the word knome/gnome

On the subject of audio in Linux, I've had a lot success with AV Linux.

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

The developer has JACK working fairly well, and its a Realtime Kernel so latency isn't really an issue when it comes to recording.

Ubuntu Studio on the other hand is just vaporware.

I've also heard really good things about Studio64, but I only run Linux on older 32 bit systems so I've never tried it.

As far as Ardour goes, it works, but I'd suggest paying for it you want anything other than basic functionality. You can't even really edit with the free version. You can pop files back and forth between Ardour and Audacity but its extremely time consuming and tedious.

I use the native Linux version of Renoise and its very very stable. One of my favorite pseudo DAWs, but its still tracker software at heart, so if you can't stand coding I'd suggest something else. All that being said I also own a Macbook and wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs in one basket if you've only got one computer. I've tried about 8 different flavors of Linux before I found one that I liked and that was stable enough to use for audio editing and songwriting.

One word of caution: AV Linux is kind of a bear to set up.

Its much easier to transition from Ubuntu to it, than doing it from a Windows PC.

I'd suggest getting Ubuntu set up on a partition and then using it for a month or two before moving over. Get to know various software in the Debian environment so that you know what kind of stuff to tweak the basic AV Linux build with. I'm no coder, I just smash together bits and pieces of other people's code until something works. It really helps to be willing to completely scrap an OS and start over again if you have to.

But AV Linux does have very detailed step by step install directions which is a refreshing change of pace in the he-man world of open source software. Seriously though, this guy built an OS by himself and it works really well. That's Bill Gates territory in my book.

As long as I'm doing the knowledge dump thing.

http://www.64studio.com/faq_user

I found this FAQ on Studio64's site enormously helpful when I was setting up my USB audio interface with JACK.

"The performance of my USB audio interface with Jack is poor. I can't get low latency without xruns, using the default Jack settings. What do I need to change?

USB audio interfaces can act strangely when set to 2 periods/buffer, the usual default for PCI sound cards or onboard chipsets. In Jack Control, please set Periods/Buffer to 3 and Frames/Period to a fairly high figure, say 256 or 512. Then try lower Frames/Period settings until you reach the lower latency limits of your system. If you don't need full duplex, setting Jack to Playback Only or Capture Only will improve performance."

I use a cheapo Alesis one, its got 2 ins, 2 outs and a Midi In/Out.

With Renoise running the JACK server you can do some really amazing stuff, it makes Rewire seem like a quaint toy in comparison. On the other hand if you use VSTs heavily in Windows getting them running in Linux is enormously difficult. That's one of the few battles I gave up on. I just settled on using Linux based plug ins, which are mostly pretty terrible.

These days I mostly use Renoise for composition and then move the file over to the Macbook and edit them in Logic.

I would like to try all that if I had the time. As it is I am considering getting my cassette based tascam out of the basement.

I have a Mac at work. I would like to read files on a 2 TB USB drive with an ext3 filesystem. If I install VIrtualBox (virtualbox.org), will I be able to do this? The VirtualBox documentation mentions Linux 2.6. How is Ubuntu related to Linux 2.6? I've heard the former works with ext3. Has anyone done this before? Should I be concerned about memory or anything like that? Thanks in advance.

Check out Vagrant: http://vagrantup.com/

More than likely you'll get a command line-only linux install you can connect to locally, but the setup time will be very low.

go with Ubuntu 10.04, the latest LTS (long term support) release. it's the most stable and doesn't have Unity.

any recent ubuntu will work with ext3 (ext3 is commonest but last generation file system, probably 10 years old now (yes, added to kernel in 2001) and superceded by ext4 (2008) and, soon, btrfs).

and 2.6 is the kernel revision, and any recent ubuntu will have a 2.6 kernel.

the bigger issue might be usb support in VirtualBox. was a time when the free version didn't support it.

Actually, this is probably easier:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ext2/

Support for ext2/ext3 disks in OS X.

Thanks! I haven't had a chance to try this yet because I've been sidetracked with other projects, but hopefully before the weekend, I'll get to try different options ... This is when I am truly thankful for ILX!!!

Hello Justin86,

We at Ubuntu Forums would like to wish you a happy birthday today!

lol

I am very disappointed at the lack of nerdery in that birthday greeting. Like I'm sure the slackware forum sends you a message in obfuscated c or something.

also kind of lol that this is the first one of these i get after being inactive on the forum for like 3 years

pysched for the linux spotify if it ever occurs

http://www.spotify.com/uk/blog/archives/2010/07/12/linux/

well look at that

I tried it but after install it would not allow me to log in - shit!

you need to be a premium member.

"UPDATE: Spotify for Linux is now also available for Spotify Unlimited subscribers."
I idiotically thought that was the free version

that puts me in the unusual position of using a program for free in windows but paying for the linux version

Had Ubuntu shares visible and r/w in Lion. Rebooted Ubuntu and I can't see the shares anymore. I think that's the end for me and Linux.

after months of annoyance i definitely think 11.04 is the worst release of ubuntu ever. has anyone else had the thing when you go to install a printer and it asks you for a root password?.....A ROOT PASSWORD?

if the next release isn't a lot slicker i'm gonna switch distros. what do non-ubuntu people use?

linux 4 life

Top 10 here --> http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

Linux Mint is probably the way to go now. I'm out of touch with the whole scene but that one comes up a lot.

has anyone else had the thing when you go to install a printer and it asks you for a root password?.....A ROOT PASSWORD?

No, but I don't think I've tried printing from 11.04. Unity crashed so often that I moved to unity-2d.

I see no point in going back to Gnome if they're killing it off completely in 11.10.

er bollocksed up the paragraph points there

it is a bit of a worry. i'm on the LTS of ubuntu so i should be ok until, what, 2015 (which is probably 2 laptops down the line). it's not just ubuntu and unity either - gnome3 uses a similar paradigm. never got on with kde since v4

i did try crunchbang, which uses fluxbox (which i'm familiar with) but the black theming made it unusable (too many reflections) and changing it was non-trivial.

I've not seen gnome 3 in action so can't really judge. kde 4 impressed me and gave me the shits in equal measure, but I've never been a kde person.

Linux Mint is probably the way to go now. I'm out of touch with the whole scene but that one comes up a lot.

Apparently I'm so out of touch I haven't heard of Linux Mint. What's it good at?

Last time I went to install Ubuntu it would, strangely, recognise my network card in "LiveCD" mode but not when actually installed, so I went with Debian because it recognised my card right out of the box, and I was fairly happy with it, but the epic waits for things to be deemed "stable" enough to go into the stable repository (which I was sticking with because otherwise something upgrades itself and possibly breaks, or breaks something else, every other day) are a bit tiresome.

(Mind you, most of my Linux use is command-line only - monitor is rarely plugged in, mostly just ssh in from a Windows laptop - so I realise that many of the big selling points of "use our distribution because it has nice themes and custom graphical widgets" may be a bit lost on me)

mint's traditionally been ubuntu with all the multimedia stuff added back in. last i heard it had promised to eschew the unity desktop bits that ubuntu have added and delay moving to gnome3 until it's mature. it also does something wacky with the menu which i don't like, it's like an entire panel that pops up. and it's a bit green.

http://www.linuxmint.com/img/screenshots/isadora/menu.png

wth

precise pangolin? it's a scaley anteater...

upgraded to ubuntu 11.10 today and couldn't get the window system to open because something was wrong with my nvidia drivers, messed around trying to fix things from the terminal for an hour before throwing my hands up, reformatting the OS partition, and installing 10.10 from CD. fuck unity.

and yet of course i still have this pathological urge to delete all my config information and try to install 11.10 again from scratch what is wrong with me

the joy of linux

masochistic mule

lol exactly

just upgraded to 11.10....last chance for ubuntu

and yet of course i still have this pathological urge to delete all my config information and try to install 11.10 again from scratch what is wrong with me

yeah i've never upgraded without feeling there is something *wrong*

I use 10.5 but mostly I just check email and the Glen Matlock fansites - right solid as a bitch IMO

i also upgraded to 11.10 today. no mobile broadband now though. humpf. (reboots into the last LTS)

I didn't like the dash and lack of proper menu on Ubuntu 11.10 beta and 11.5 to such an extent that one of my computers is now ubuntu Lucid Lynx, and the other is Xubuntu 11.10 and I mostly only use Windows 7.

I've found the different flavors of Mint frustrating because of the lack of easier customization, software availability, and software upgrades. (that is part of the point of Mint though). I was looking into Arch because it's the cool contrarian distro lately, but that stuff is several levels above me.

I upgraded to 11.10 (first time I've upgraded an Ubuntu instead of reinstalling) and it was fine, apart from the installer interpreting a small problem with flash-plugin-nonfree as INSTALLER FAILED SYSTEM IS DEAD YOU CANNOT USE YOUR NEW SYSTEM PANIC PANIC which turned out to be a lie. Oh and gloobus doesn't work anymore.

masochistic mule

― the boomtown rats in The Wall (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, October 19, 2011 7:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

loll

got mobile broadband working. not entirely sure how (because i upgraded 2 things at once when maybe one would've been enough. usb-modeswitch and wicd). rebooting to working system, download .deb file, reboot to 11.10, dpkg, write down missing dependency, rinse repeat. tedious.

improvements to dash look like actual improvements, at least the button is bigger. and was the desktop menu there before? it has links to documents which will be useful. still don't think unity is for me though.

Trying to find a good low-memory distro for my partner to use on their ~10 year old Dell laptop that they'll still be able to use Google Docs with - been running Peppermint (kind've a Chromebook version of Mint), but it gets a bit slow/choppy at times (cld just be Google Docs, tbh) - anyone have any experience with Vector/CrunchBang/Puppy for this kind've thing?

i liked unity but this rollback to 10.10 (only rolled back there instead of to 11.04 because i had a burned cd of one but not the other) is actually the best thing that's happened to me this month; i'd forgotten how fast ubuntu ran pre-unity. which is my "rig"'s fault as much as the OS's, i'm sure, but whatever.

modem working seems to have been an anomoly. also couldn't find a screensaver, not a one.

now, where's that mandriva cd...

From my post a long time ago, fuse-ext2 mounts as read only and in spite of what is in the documentation I could not mount as read+write and I found other people saying they had the same problem, so I tried Virtual Box with Ubuntu 11.10 instead and after some difficulty with getting it to recognize the USB drive I was able to decrypt and untar the files and hopefully it will be done when I get back from lunch.

Virtualbox on fedora is a nightmare.

i downgraded modemmanager to the natty version, as suggested by a german ubuntu forum page, and my mobile broadband works again on oneiric. lol, progress.