Anyone else out there using Linux ?

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silverhammer

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I seriously am going to dump bs(humph), I mean mswindows etal. I love Linux but am so new to it I haven't really gotten to audio stuff yet. If anyone else out there has a working Linux audio system please reply, I would love to talk to you and get some help. Peace, Silver
 
I've been dabbling with Linux on and off.

Unfortunately, I haven't managed to get any killer apps for Linux audio just yet. However I like how stable and simple it is to use nowadays.

Sang
 
I've found some apps but can't install properly

Ecasound sounds great, Protux sounds good, Audacity even sounds good for a start, but I cannot get any of these to install properly. Rpmfind doesn't connect to the Protux rpm page. I just get a black screen. If you have any success please let me know, I think the OS is great. I hate #%#$#ms. I've never had to restart my Linux system, yet , on average 98se freezes, locks, crashes, or blue-screen-of-deaths me at least 3 or 4 times a day, minimum. GPL and OpenSource are great, I guess I just need to learn more. Thanks for the reply, Silver
 
Linux. As a server OS, I really love it. I got a few servers running here (uptimes of >200 days @ full load). As a desktop OS.. it isn't quite there yet, compared to Windows. Not as easy in use. It's more stable but it hasn't convinced me yet to reinstall my desktop machine. (I must add that Win98SE doesn't disappoint me at all stability-wise).
 
My Windows 2000 servers (running Exchange, SQL Server, ISA, IIS) (previously NT4) have 100% uptime over the past two years, and are only taken down for routine security updates. I do like linux quite a bit though, and I'm using it on my home server. Currently I'm running Redhat 7.3 but I used to run slakware...hard to say which I like better. Slak is more standard, and Redhat almost feels bloated. Blah, anyways...

Win9x is not an operating system that *anybody* will have a great time with. I've been using NT4 and 2000 on my DAW for years and I never have to restart.

The question you have to ask yourself is, do you hate microsoft more than you love recording music? A choice will have to be made....UNLESS you can get something to work:

http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linuxsound/

Good luck to you.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Yeah, that's the whole rub

That's what I keep asking myself. What am I willing to wait for as far as open source software development. I absolutely abhor ms licensing and ultra proprietary hold-you-hostage software. I like what Linux stands for, open development and cooperation from a great number of people, mostly voluntarily. I wish I was a programmer, I would like to develop an audio workstation program that would encourage more people to make the leap to something better in the long run. I love digital recording but I guess my experiences with 98se have seriously burned me. Everytime I lose an entire midi sequence because win locks or performs some illegal function I just scream . Enough ranting. Thanks for the link but I have prowled through that site a lot. I think I just need more Linux experience to make some of those things work. Thanks guys, Silver
 
Sounds like somebody needs to ditch Win9x and grab an NT OS.

As an individual end user, how does MS licensing affect you? If you had said you were using XP, you may have a point, but Win98 licensing is rather straightforward.
 
In regards to licensing

I've done a lot of research on software licensing. Read the fine print. You don't own the software you think you are buying. You are purchasing the license for the right to use the software only in the manner dictated to you by the vendor. It would be like you buying a car a being told you were only buying the right to use the car in a certain way. For instance you are only allowed to drive the car on certain days, or certain distances, or only at specific times. Violate the license and you lose the right to use the car even though you have paid exhorbitant amounts of money to do so. Plus, since you no longer can use the car, the vendor won't take it back either so you are just sol. It's way bad for the end user/consumer, it only caters to corporate greed. I legally cannot put my version of win98se that I paid for on a second computer that I own. Legally, according to ms licensing, I would have to purchase an additional license for the same bug ridden piece of crap os that I hated already. Bullshit all the way. Proprietary vendors can kiss my hairy ass. Check into it, you'll be surprised to see you have no rights as a software consumer. Who do you know that will let you return software after it has been opened ? How else will you find out if you love it or hate it ? If you hate it though you are just stuck with a piece of shit you can't give back. If my shoes aren't right, my car isn't right, my refridgerator isn't right, I can return all those items. Software should be exactly the same. You should get to try before you buy or get to return it if it is a lemon. Long Live open source and the general public license, Silver
 
Dude, think about it a little bit. If you buy a car, you can't make 500 copies of it! :)

Yes, you can install Windows on multiple machines if you promise not to use both machines at the same time. If you buy a video card, can you use the video card in both machines at the same time?

Just because software is easy to copy, people often seem to think that they should have the right to copy it. That's just odd.

I will agree, however, that a lot of software is VERY overpriced. Anti-return policies are also a bad situation, and you definately need to find a vendor you can count on for returns. I never buy software that can't be returned (unless I've demoed it).

I also hate microsoft licensing. I think it's greedy and at times insulting. Their activities in the BSA also piss me off to no end.

However, I don't feel that software licensing is a violation of my rights. Every piece of opensource software is accompanied by a very lengthly GNU license that restricts what you can and cannot do with the binary and source.

I wish software vendors would price at a much lower point so that fewer of us would have to become pirates. The most irritating figures to come out of the "industry" are piracy losses...it's 80% bullshit. You can't get money from people who aren't willing to spend the money.

Slackmaster 2000
 
I want quality at a fair price

I don't mind paying a fair price for a good product. Its reliability and functionality that matter the most to me. It doesn't have to be flashy or glitzy, just work good. Ms stuff is so buggy it has spawned a whole sector of the industry for third parties to manufacture software to try to work around or patch the errors that ms didn't bother fixing in the first place. Look at norton utilities, powerquest products, etc..
Yeah, I know you can't make 500 copies of the automobile but many of the issues are the same regardless of the product.
If you have read the General Public License, it says mostly that you can do whatever you want with the software and long as you give credit where credit is due and include the GPL. If Ms released the source code for windows98se for instance, programmers all over the world would get all the bugs out of it and it could totallly rock, and everyone could still use the software they already have for that platform. Ms is pure hateful greed and that will never happen.

Anyway, thanks for trading ideas, I learn a lot from this forum and appreciate hearing from other people to share experiences and knowledge. Peace everybody, Silver
 
Wow.

In my experiments with Linux, some happy, some not so happy, I've figured that Linux is probably ready, or very close to ready except for one bug: compatibility.

MS OSs being the most widely available and rampantly pirated Oss around, they've become some sort of a standard. All they need to do is come up with an OS tha's completely unpiratable, and charge the earth for it (which they already do), and Linux will step right in.

The only reason MS is so big is that almost everybody runs some MS OS or the other and you might have to remain on that OS, say in a large corporation or business house.

Is Linux ready for server? Well, I'm not sure anybody will say it's not, it has a nice large deployment base and more and more x86 servers are going Linux, which is as respected as any MS server OS.

Is Linux ready for desktop? Well, I have to say yes to that, too. The new installs come with full software suites that take care of any average Joe. I find Mandrake 8.2 as easy to install as any Windows OS, and much quicker to set up. Hardware support is pretty good, at least in my case where the only thing that doesn't work is my Motorola softmodem.

Is Linux ready for pro audio? Well, sadly, no. Neither for professional imaging, desktop publishing, nor any of the most popular professional applications. That is not a Linux shortcoming, but a shortcoming of the software development industry. The WINE project, well, I'm not so sure it's a great idea anyway. There is bound to be slow and laggy response as in the case of any emulator.

My .02 is that Linux will be on the pro scene soon. MS has been around much longer, and does anyone remember MS-DOS or Win 3.11, and what you could do with that stuff? Just give it a few more years. It is going to happen, and happen soon. When it does, I for one will not go back to MS. Never.

Sang

PS: nobody can/should iron out bugs in 98. For that you have to debug MS-DOS, which is a very buggy 16-bit OS on which 98 is built in the first place. Also if all bugs in 98 were ironed out, half the applications written for it would not work anymore, as a lot of them had code that anticipated those bugs and corrected / compensated for them. You'd have to go and write fresh code for nearly every app again for it to work on 98. So consider that route closed. I however find that 2000 works the best. It's rock stable, doesn't have the flash of XP but just as stable and powerful, and supports 99% of all apps that run on 98/95, with the exception of some games.
 
Hear Hear Brother !!!!!!!

Sang,
Right on target. Man, when I can do multitrack audio recording and editing in Linux there will be no reason whatsoever for me to use any MS crap again. Waiting anxiously for that day and I'm going to throw a good riddance to bad rubbish party. Peace, Silver
 
my 2 cents

If linux had high quality proaudio software I would pay almost anything for it. It's just that nobody makes a commercial pro audio suite for it. If Cakewalk SONAR 2.0 XL had a linux verson that cost twice as much I would still buy it.

With Star Office linux has a kick but desktop application that is loads uglier but loads more powerful than MS office and it's free from Sun Microsystems. Infact thats what I use as my office suite on my windoze computers. why pay money for something that has fewer applications? . . . now if only GNOME had a kill button so you wouldn't have to go to console . . and almost no viruses.

as a server I wouldn't think of useing anything else.
 
I was doing a little looking around for audio for Linux, specifically progamming stuff, like how robust the audio API is (I do a bit of software development). It looks like the core audio API in Linux is somewhat lacking (for DAW work) and has led to independent groups to develop their own audio API's. Seems to me that this would be a barrier for any major-player audio app on Linux, as they would either have to develop their own API, or use someone else's API, which doesn't sound like all that good of an idea. So, if they use their own, custom-built API, then is every audio app gonna have to recompile the kernel on install? Can anybody confirm any of this?
 
Something that is lacking in linux and holding it back is the lack of standards. For audio you have at least alsa and oss. Then there are all the distributions, non using the same install directories. If all aps have to support everything and every combination, it will cost them loads to support. If the linux community once saw that and solved that, it would rise sky-high. No more duplication of effort.
 
Heh, one of the biggest problems with Linux is that the average joe blow has a hard enough time getting WINDOWS to run...can you imagine how they feel when they read something like, "oh, you have to recompile the driver with the --nerdtalk flag" ??

I am really excited about where linux is going though. Some of these distributions are really getting super user-friendly!!!!

On an aside, I must say that I'm EXTREMELY impressed with Mac OSX...I knew it was built on *nix, but I didn't think you'd really be able to use it like a *nix system! Props to macintosh.

BTW, star office is no longer free, but it's cheap. OpenOffice, which is based on staroffice, is free. It doesn't come with a database application though. OpenOffice is available for Windows as well, and I use it and like it. Not nearly as stable as Office 2000/XP (neither is Star Office), but the price is right and the features are there! The MS Office format converters are AWESOME!

To whoever asked, the BSA is a group of giant software company lawyers who go around the world accusing people of stealing software. Represented are asswipe companies like Microsoft and Macromedia. They "politely" ask companies to "volunteer" for licensing audits, and they collect information about the licensing practices of various companies (e.g. angry-employee tipoffs, etc) and then sue the shit out of them. In various other countries around the world that don't enjoy the same rights as we do in the US, they conduct raids with the support of foreign governments....and then they publicize the raids in an effort to scare people into thinking that they're some kind of legitamate law-enforcement organization. They also work closely with large resellers (like insight.com) to pressure customers into upgrading software (e.g., "get a free licensing evaluation...upgrade to Windows XP now, and be free from BSA legal action for one year." crazy shit like that)

Slackmaster 2000
 
Anybody tried Win4Lin?
Is it stable and functional?
If it is, then using our PC based software on Linux suddenly becomes very possible.
 
If it is, then using our PC based software on Linux suddenly becomes very possible.
Most of the time direct hardware access via emulation sucks, which kinda prevents anyone from doing any serious audio work.
 
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