Re: [LAU] Gentoo as a DAW platform

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 5:49 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Brent Busby <brent@email-addr-hidden> 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.

I use Gentoo as a DAW and don't see myself moving away from that
anytime soon. The power of USE flags means I can decide on a whim how
I want my system to be, without the package maintainers having much
influence on me. Setting up your own overlay with old packages you
might need is a breeze once you look into how it works, and compile
times shouldn't be much of an issue these days. On a quad core I can
even compile at the same time as recording music! Otherwise, compiling
at night should work for most people. Don't mess with CFLAGS ;)

Arve
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Received on Sun May 10 12:15:01 2009