Re: [LAU] Gentoo as a DAW platform

On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Brent Busby <brent@keycorner.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 10 May 2009, Ray Rashif wrote:
>
>>> From personal experience, my very first _hobby_ project before I started out
>> in the audio industry was to set up a Linux studio environment with Gentoo.
>> I ended up victimised and gave in to the CFLAGS club while never having
>> gotten anything done. That was the period of my life I wish I could fix. I
>
> I've already avoided getting sucked into that in my life with FreeBSD.
> I use only '-O2 -march=athlon64 -pipe' and nothing else.
>
> If I were to go to Gentoo, I wouldn't be seeking compiler optimizations
> so much as freedom to keep consistent things that distros change their
> minds about just as soon as you think you've found one with policies you
> like.  Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse...I used to think they were each
> mistakes in a learning process until I finally realized that at the
> particular time I liked each one, it was because of something they were
> each respectively doing right at the time.  They just change their minds
> and you have to go looking for a new "least evil choice."
>
> I think one possibly overlooked advantage of a source-based distro is it
> might give you a platform where you can adopt a policy of your own for
> how things are going to be and expect that it will stay the same long
> enough for you to enjoy it.  I don't know, I'm still trying to decide
> though, and I am open to all kinds of ideas.

Be careful with Gentoo and thinking you can keep things stable. Gentoo
removes packages from portage, sometimes quite quickly. You could
build a working machine today and find out 6 months from now that if
you tried to build the same machine again you couldn't. I've had this
problem with two machines I have that require an old ATI driver to get
video on the S-Video output, and that driver only works with old
kernels, and neither the driver or the kernel are available in portage
anymore. I was able to build this machine 4 years ago. No way I could
build it today except that I created my own overlay after finding out
that Gentoo removed everything I needed.

It's very do-able with Gentoo but you need to stay on top of it.

And I agree - compiler options are not the most important. I use very
simple CFLAGS, just as you propose. USE flags handle most of what I
need to do.

Good luck.

- Mark
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
Received on Sun May 10 08:15:02 2009