So today i hiked off to witness what amounted to a bunch of largely age 60+
gentleman (& one younger woman) in a community hall ripping hundreds of old
corporate workstations to bits, repairing & reassembling them, installing
ubuntu & shipping them off to papua new guinea & africa etc etc.

jackpot! boy did they get an earful from me! ; )

anyway i'm gonna give them $100 & spend an afternoon under their supervision
installing some extra ram  (133 ram, whatever that is, something old...) &
hard drive space in one of their old compaq D51 machines & voila! My "lets
learn linux" environment will be underway...

aims:

1) install csound
2) install python
3) install some C/C++ development tools so that any future front end / GUI
stuff i might explore is squarely out of the Microsoft-dependency picture

+ check out all those more "pointyheaded" tools (Algoscore, anything to do
with SDIF or ATS or Loris that has until now remained beyond my effective
reach...)

once i have some "linux nouse" in 6 to 12 months time, i'll look at getting
a "proper" machine to run a linux based audio & development environment on,
& the transition will be complete. Current "generic windows audio" set up
remains functional & as is...

So given this linux machine's somewhat archaic nature, what Csound
installation do i need to get for compatability with this machines hardware?

Is it TOO archaic do you think? I'm mainly concerned about chip architecture
compatability i suppose - it has a 1.6Ghz P4 in it - so any 32 bit standard
Csound / linux installation will do? 

What about all this "133" business?

I'll probably up it to 1G of ram & a much larger than its current 20GB hard
drive. It doesn't have to fly at this stage - just work in a reliable &
useful manner..

Would anyone recommend a *nix installation other than ubuntu "7.something or
other" given my desired application for this machine?

Looking forward into the brave new world - but keen to identify traps for
new players.

T.




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Thanks Guys...

next random question off the top of my head...

low latency / ASIO style drivers for the generic motherboard 1/8 inch sound
out?

something like "ASIO for all" but for linux?

(the ol cranker only has USB1 ports, but does have 2 free PCI slots....
could consider buying a PCI slot card, but may wait & keep the investment
for when i get a "mean machine" later on down the track...)

The question as to whether i want to go purely command line / vi style based
(jpff) is an interesting one - assumedly these "desktop" environments (i did
see KDE back a few years ago..) throw open console windows etc when required
for the standard command line / vi style interfacing 

Gnome is something ive glimpsed at the margins of my "commencing GUI
development" research ... will only certain desktop environments under *nix
support certain gui library dependency types? (ie a Gnome desktop
environment would be easier to develop & run simple GUI tools for & on if
using GTK libraries - Gnome being a GTK dependent thing, right?)  or is it
simply a case of installing / compiling with any necessary dependencies & it
will run on / in any Linux environ - desktop or otherwise?

let me know when this gets boring, but you know that "spontenaneity" is not
something i'm renowned for - research everything to absolute death first
being the name of my game generally...





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Tim Mortimer wrote:
> Thanks Guys...
> 
> next random question off the top of my head...
> 
> low latency / ASIO style drivers for the generic motherboard 1/8 inch sound
> out?
> 
> something like "ASIO for all" but for linux?

There's a low latency kernel, which is standard with Ubuntu 
Studio.

> The question as to whether i want to go purely command line / vi style based
> (jpff) is an interesting one - assumedly these "desktop" environments (i did
> see KDE back a few years ago..) throw open console windows etc when required
> for the standard command line / vi style interfacing 

Yes.  And if you don't like gvim you can use a shell 
function to open a new console window with vim in it.

> Gnome is something ive glimpsed at the margins of my "commencing GUI
> development" research ... will only certain desktop environments under *nix
> support certain gui library dependency types? (ie a Gnome desktop
> environment would be easier to develop & run simple GUI tools for & on if
> using GTK libraries - Gnome being a GTK dependent thing, right?)  or is it
> simply a case of installing / compiling with any necessary dependencies & it
> will run on / in any Linux environ - desktop or otherwise?

Any application will run on any desktop.  I use Xubuntu, 
with XFCE, because it's supposed to be the most minimal 
Ubuntu.  I don't know what functionality it's missing but it 
looks pretty slick to me.  You can also start with a 
standard Ubuntu and switch to whatever window manager you like.

One thing about Ubuntu and Csound, though, is that I 
installed Csound5 from a .deb and the Update Manager keeps 
insisting I replace it with Csound4.  I believe the latest 
version of Csound is compiled with more recent libraries 
than the latest Ubuntu release as well.  But fear not!  The 
forthcoming Ubuntu is already in beta.  If you're installing 
from scratch at this stage it might be simpler to go with 
that beta (or wait until the final release).


                     Graham

So just to try & wrap this up I went to buy my extra ram & hard drive today &
the guy seems very sympathetic & sold me a completely different p4 2.6GhZ
machine with a gig of ram & an 80 gig hard drive & USB2 ports for AU$250
bucks instead. easy.

A friend & i are hopefully getting together tomorrow & installing Ubuntu 7.1
as i hoping to get broadband hooked up (finally) later this week & solve my
net issues at the same time as start playing around with some linux apps -
Supercollider is making a rapid ascent up the priorities list for a first
look. Things are looking up in crapsville.

As the present Ubuntu is looking likely at this stage (my "Linux Friend"
says "hold off on Ubuntu 8 because there are some significant core audio
changes that may affect a lot of apps in their present forms" - he's not a
muso but works in the mining industry & is something of a Linux geek so I
trust him...)

So this leaves me pre-empively trying to solve the issue Graham raised below
after I install Csound 5.08 on the Ubuntu machine.

Is there a workaround, or is the status of the issue simply "annoying" &
therefore simply not worth the trouble to resolve?

i may also download the pure:dyne cd once I have the bandwidth to do so.

cheers

Tim


Graham Breed wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> One thing about Ubuntu and Csound, though, is that I 
> installed Csound5 from a .deb and the Update Manager keeps 
> insisting I replace it with Csound4.  I believe the latest 
> version of Csound is compiled with more recent libraries 
> than the latest Ubuntu release as well.  But fear not!  The 
> forthcoming Ubuntu is already in beta.  If you're installing 
> from scratch at this stage it might be simpler to go with 
> that beta (or wait until the final release).
> 
> 
>                      Graham
> 
> 
> 


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Tim Mortimer wrote:

> So this leaves me pre-empively trying to solve the issue Graham raised below
> after I install Csound 5.08 on the Ubuntu machine.
> 
> Is there a workaround, or is the status of the issue simply "annoying" &
> therefore simply not worth the trouble to resolve?

Well, I'd quite like to know myself.

It's certainly not beyond "annoying".  As the real work's 
going into packages for the main repositories, this isn't 
worth the trouble, because one day it'll sort itself out in 
an update.  It's just a question of picking the version 
where it magically works out.

I think you can use the "force version" in Synaptic to get 
rid of the "update" hints.  But then if a true update does 
make it in you *won't* get told.

 From what I understand of the Ubuntu release cycle, it'll 
probably never be fixed in 7.10.  The package has 
dependencies that can't be satisfied.  And existing Ubuntu 
releases are only updated for minor versions of packages. 
That's why I'm waiting for 8.04 which will have up to date 
libraries and so hopefully the standard package will work.

I'm worried it might already be too late to get into the 
repositories for 8.04 though.  That'd be a shame if the long 
term stable release still has an obsolete version of Csound :-S

At least, I can report that the .deb I got from the website 
for Csound 5.04 does work with Ubuntu 7.10.  And it installs 
without problems, except for being confused about the 
versions of Csound and FLTK.  I can't speak for later 
releases and I believe the latest one does use library 
versions Ubuntu 7.10 doesn't have (hence I didn't try it).


                       Graham

Thanks Graham & everyone as per usual.

I've got ubuntu up & running & my linux friend installed lots of basic stuff
that he thought i'd find useful & gave me a basic tour.

He balked a little when we came to look at building csound & supercollider
(which is of some amusement / concern, as he rifled comprehensively around
the command line doing pretty much everything else.., but it was getting
late by that stage.)

So I'm gonna try & build these suckers for myself. 

I think the quote goes "I may be quite sometime" - but we all know 6 to 8
weeks from now i'll be thanking myself.

(& I made sure i got him to install emacs mr ff!)

bring it on.

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hermetic music * python * csound * possibly mindless ranting
various werk in perpetual delusions of progress....

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