[arch-general] Audio distro

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2013-10-18 at 21:48 +0200, Joakim Hernberg wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Oct 2013 20:15:48 +0200
> Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2013-10-17 at 19:47 +0200, Karol Blazewicz wrote:
> > > I'm not sure why a separate distro would be needed, there's e.g.
> > > http://archaudio.org/
> > 
> > Thank you,
> > 
> > I'm uncertain, if an audio distro is useful and I'll take a deeper
> > look into what already exists for Arch later.
> > 
> > Unfortunately the lists archives end with June 2013/July 2013.
> 
> Unfortunately archaudio is nearly dead.  The people who were willing to
> package have become TUs instead, so quite a few packages are in
> extra/community already.  I do maintain a linux-rt kernel in
> archaudio-production.  The reason it's old, is that up until now
> 3.10-rt has been quite flaky, and the 3.8.11-rt8 is the last one that
> was really stable for me.  I try to keep a stable kernel in the repo
> and leave the bleeding edge to AUR.
> 
> Personally I think that AUR is a great thing, but most likely the
> reason that we don't have a binary repo with all the audio software in
> it.  I also suspect that many simply use something like yaourt and
> simply treat the AUR as a binary repo, maybe not the smartest thing
> but the path of least resistance and all that...
> 
> In closing imo it's a shame that  Archlinux doesn't have a -rt kernel
> in the main repos, as it's impossible to do glitchfree and really low
> latency audio without a -rt kernel.

PS after closing the thread. Perhaps we could continue this thread at
the archaudio list. I'll subscribe within the next days.

I'm using AUR as a quasi binary repository, but for linux-rt it's
different. Right now I build my own lts, 3.8.13-rt14-1-rt-lts, this was
the last linux-rt that did run, while I didn't test it for audio
production. 3.10-rt kernels don't work on my machine, usually the login
already fails.

Speaking of the devil, right now I got "ERROR: A failure occurred in
package_linux-rt-lts()". Perhaps I have to post a request to
archaudio ;). First I try to solve it myself.

Btw. I agree with Fons, but many users and developers are comfortable
with other distros, so this seems to be a very subjective point of view.

Regards,
Ralf