Re: [linux-audio-user] Debian and friends

On Mon, 06 Mar 2006 Lee A. Azzarello asked:

> 1) What Debian communities for audio software packaging are you a part of?

none

> 2) How do you install new releases to your system?

Only when I need to.

Recently I rebuilt my system starting with the etch network
installer after breaking my system (and corrupting my apt
database) after accidentally starting to upgrade hundreds of
packages after requesting a package that needed to upgrade
the C libraries to libc6.

Quite a bit of configuring needed, even tho I could use
many of my previous /etc files.

There is nothing like having a stable production system!

> 3) How often do you build your own kernel for audio systems?

Once every two years or so. Just yesterday a new shiny
2.6.15.6 with 1000Hz clock and PREEMPT (after reading about
it here.) I've been doing okay with a stock debian 2.6.12,
but wanted to try flipping a few kernel settings.
Not much need for patching these days. The more heavy duty
realtime stuff loads your system quite a bit.

> 4) If you're not running real Debian, what made you change?
> 5) If you are running real Debian, have you upgraded to etch or sid?

In the sarge days I would try to install a package with
apt-get, and if I needed something newer would recompile from
sources.

Problem is, if your sources.list point only to stable, you
only get old stuff, and missing a lot of the latest, newest
stuff entirely. Add a couple lines and now you get newer
stuff, but then you need to upgrade C libraries.

I don't know how you do that in Debian. I've smashed my
system every time I tried, probably because the only way I
could see to do it was to use --force, which I did without
really understanding (or heeding the many warnings.)

In my new system, I thought I would stay with the 'etch'
sources, but the siren call of prepackaged binaries has
brought me to add the 'sid' package listings as well.

The world is different now. I had spent weeks trying to get
ardour to compile in the old days. Now I find a site that
has a ardour .deb that came up right the first time!
(Broken now, dunno what I did...)

With the etch installer I got a 2.6 kernel out of the box.
Alsa is already in there. Hotplugging USB and Firewire works
much better, and now I'm about to test out the udev system
for populating device nodes in /dev. Exim4 for debian comes
with some simple templates for typical mail configurations.

Using libc6 I can use rdiff-backup, which is the easiest, most
painless, reliable system that I've ever used to back up my
system. I just hacked up some scripts that use 'parted' and
rdiff-backup to clone my system to another drive, with the
added advantage of storing multiple file versions if I ever
need them. Also works over NFS.

I can use new stuff like 'powertweak' which can show me
pages and pages of hardware and software parameters I could
spend my whole life learning to diddle.

I can find .debs for stuff like mplayer, and install the
codecs I need to be able to see flash and videos and stuff
and that is, I have to say, cooler than a text-and-images
browser experience.

That said, it is always a bit of a bear to reconfigure.
I thought I would never need to do it again, but then I
pressed the wrong button, and for some reasons, my tar
backups didn't work quite right :-p

-- 
Joel Roth