Create Digital Music has an interesting post up today by composer/musician Kim Cascone in which he details how he switched both his studio setup and his live performance machine from a Mac to a netbook running Ubuntu.

It’s always good to see success stories, though there are a number of takeaway points from his write-up. One obvious thing is that basically no distro gets JACK integration ‘just working’ out of the box. I’m not advocating it be started always (except maybe in a ‘multimedia production’ spin of Fedora maybe. After all, not every user is going to be an audio content creator. Regardless, a big step forward would be having it start on demand when programs that need it get launched for example.

Then there’s the real time kernel. I’ve back and forth’d in email with Peter Kirn CDM’s editor quite a bit recently about the rt kernel. It’s still a fairly large diff outside of the mainline kernel. This has made it hard to integrate into Fedora. We try to avoid packaging additional flavour of the kernel where we can avoid it, just due to the increased workload each build causes (increased buildtime, increased space on mirrors, increased bugs…) Also, it occasionally lags behind mainline by a few weeks, which means it’s not really feasible for rawhide.
Hopefully the -rt maintainers have a strategy for eventually getting all the remaining parts merged, but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon. Until then, people who need -rt will find themselves either patching it in themselves, and foregoing kernel support from their distro, or choosing a distro which chooses to package it.

Anyway, I found it an interesting read, and was expecting it to be a lot more “linux fails” than it was, and ended up being pleasantly surprised.

I’ve a number of other thoughts on Linux as a music creation platform, which I’ll go into another time, as this post is starting to ramble.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.