Re: [LAU] Gentoo as a DAW platform

On Saturday 09 May 2009 7:00:08 pm Brent Busby wrote:
> Since there's been some discussion recently about questionable choices
> from the distros about the way they build multimedia apps that people
> depend on, sometimes building large numbers of packages against problem
> libraries that can't just easily be swapped out and corrected, what is
> the prevalent opinion about Gentoo? Does anyone here have any comments
> about getting actual work done on a Gentoo workstation?
>
> I should say while asking this that I have done source based upgrades of
> the base OS and package system on FreeBSD for a long time, so I'm not
> unfamiliar with some of the ups and downs of this approach (days of
> compiling, packages that never really do quite integrate together,
> etc.). But FreeBSD isn't a very good multimedia OS, partially due to
> limitations in the kernel, which was made for TCP/IP, not for low
> latency.
>
> Should I have my head examined for even thinking of depending on Gentoo
> for a DAW workstation (which will also do some video editing and perhaps
> gaming on the side)? Or would this be an effective way to avoid all the
> distro politics and have my binaries compiled from nearly vanilla
> upstream and linked to whatever libraries I darned well want them to be?

I've used Gentoo as the basis for my DAW since 2003. I've built DAWs for
friends based on Gentoo. It can be very frustrating if you don't have at least
a minimal understanding of programming, compiling, and the basics of how linux
works.

Every once in a while I run into an issue with a package here and there, but
Google usually has the answer.

It is a rolling distro, so you are best advised to use one of two approaches:

1 - Get it up and running, and never touch it again.
2 - Set aside time to update it about once every 2 months

Since everybody is listing their compile options...
I use "-O2 -march=native -mfpmath=sse -ftree-vectorize -pipe"

-Reuben
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Received on Wed May 13 08:15:01 2009