Re: [linux-audio-user] A couple of questions

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 13:27 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On 4/2/06, Jan Depner <eviltwin69@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 10:22 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
> > > On 4/2/06, Lee Revell <rlrevell@email-addr-hidden-job.com> wrote:
> > > > On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 18:22 +0200, Christoph Eckert wrote:
> > > <SNIP>
> > > > > for example, the Gentoo user mailing list is full of questions like "I
> > > > > did follow the excellent Gentoo ALSA user guide, but I still get no
> > > > > sound."
> > > >
> > > > Well, people who use Gentoo are expected to know what they are doing.
> > >
> > > Yeah....but many of us don't! ;-) Can't be expected to know what you
> > > don't know or know what the implications are of what you don't know,
> > > or even that you don't know... ;-)
> > >
> >
> > I tend to agree with Lee on this one. Gentoo is designed for those
> > who want to do things the hard way. Granted, it probably can help
> > newbies to understand Linux a bit better but it's a tough row to hoe.
> > Suse or Fedora are probably much easier to deal with. If you're a
> > newbie and you're really serious about getting sound to work you're
> > better off with Planet CCRMA or DeMuDi.
> >
>
> Actually, having run Suse, Redhat, Fedora 1, 2 & 3 and Gentoo, in the
> end I found Gentoo the *easiest* to deal with on a day to day level.
> Everything is available from one place and installed in one way. It's
> very configurable down to compile time options for pretty much
> everything. I've come to quite like it. I converted an existing MythTV
> frontend machine running fluxbox to a desktop oriented machine with
> browsers, flash, mplayer and Xine this weekend in a matter of a few
> hours and only by running about 10 commands and walking away until it
> was done. My audio machine here has 6 window
> managers/environment/thingies for me to play with. NFS, Samba for
> communication with my network was pretty easy.
>
> The two real downside issues with Gentoo are the continual building of
> code and the installation process. Building code is just the way
> Gentoo will mostly be forever, even though today you can get a lot of
> packages already compiled, but compiled on the machine will probably
> always be the most stable. The installation process has been addressed
> recently with some sort of graphical installer, apparently, but I
> haven't needed to do a new install so I haven't tested it.
>

    As you well know, I used to do everything on a "build it yourself"
basis because, as you said, that was the most stable way to deal with
it. In the last year or two though I just let Planet CCRMA handle most
of the builds. If I'm working on an application or testing one (JAMin,
Ardour2, k3b) I'll build it from scratch but otherwise my system has
been rock solid even with updates from the Planet.

-- 
Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner
The Fuzzy Dice
http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html
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