Poll: Distro for audio and MIDI development

Poll: Distro for audio and MIDI development

[Ismael Valladolid Torres]

Hi,

I am somewhat new to Linux low-level development. I have developed for 
other UNIX systems before, and also for Windows NT and for JavaCard 
compatible smartcards.

I have used (and enjoyed) Debian for a long time as a Linux user and for 
web development. Getting into low-level development, I find Debian sid 
slightly more unstable than I would find myself entirely comfortable 
programming with. I have tried Mandrake for Intel and PowerPC platforms 
and also enjoyed it as an user. Unluckily, latest Mandrake is not very 
well supported for PowerPC platforms, and my computer at home is an 
Apple G3 (even now, I know Mandrake 9.1 will be the last PowerPC 
version). There is no Red Hat for us (though I know about but not tried 
Yellow Dog).

I dream about a development setup as stable but also as updated as posible.

I'd like to know about your development setup, being whatever the 
platform (Intel, PowerPC, etc.), distros you like for development, 
whether if you use packaged drivers and libraries or latest versions 
compiled from snapshots or even CVS, also about packaged, stable or 
development, unstable kernels, etc.

Any feedback will be very useful. Thanks in advance.

Regards, Ismael

Re: [linux-audio-dev] Poll: Distro for audio and MIDI development

[Maarten De Boer]

This is a nice coincidence, because I just installed Debian Sid
('unstable') on my home workstation.

I am also a convinced Debian user, and all the servers and workstations
I administrate are Debian Woody ('stable'). Now, recently, I have seen
myself forced to install more and more backported packages, and backporting
some  myself, because Debian stable is rather conservative, and this can be
a problem if you have new hardware, esp. video cards, or if you need to run
recent  versions of applications, are depend on recent versions of
libraries...

Personally, I think the release cycle of Debian should be a lot shorter,
and I think a lot of people agree with that. On the other hand, on the
web/mail/file/cvs servers I run, I really want stable. The good thing is,
you get the choice, and I think Debian is the only distro with such a
choice. A lot of distro's present unstable and untested things as
stable. For me the clearest example, and actually the reason I switched to
Debian, was RedHat's broken GCC (2.96 I think), which I guess was just
included to pretend to be "cutting edge". Now, I recently installed a
RedHat 9, and with PlanetCCRMA on top, it is very nice, but running Debian
Sid does not feel less safe to me. And I would never run any mission-
critical servers with RedHat. Here Debian stable is the safest bet.

Anyway, I expect that I might switch to unstable, or at least testing, for
some of the workstations, when I feel that modifying stable becomes more work
and also more risky, than simply using unstable.

Maarten





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Re: Poll: Distro for audio and MIDI development

[Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:33:06 +0200, Ismael Valladolid Torres wrote:

> I dream about a development setup as stable but also as updated as posible.

	That's it, a dream.

	Remember, proprietary platforms achieve stability with
updatedness by sacrificing other stuff: security updates,
leanness... theoretically free software should be able to offer all
this, but it is not mature enough yet.

	I have a suspicion we are actually in the middle of another
software crisis, this time masked by the whole MS monopoly &
proprietariness vs free software debate.  And perhaps the solution
would be something like the Hurd, relational software, functional
programming or ErOS.  But for now, cool down...


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