A bit of a Linux journey (Dave's distro-hopping redux)

[Dave S]

Hey Bar,

Something that may be of interest for the Linux-heads on here.  The last week 
has been a transitional one for me, and I've been trying out some new stuff.  
I've checked out a few distros and come back with some findings that may be 
of interest to anyone who hasn't checked out the scene lately (as I hadn't 
until the last few weeks).

I recently upgraded my computer to a second-hand Athlon64 that a friend was 
selling.  First good thing was that my Gentoo install (set up for AthlonXP 
x86_32) worked fine with only minimal tweaks for the new motherboard.  Kernel 
and everything was totally fine and booted first time, which was pretty much 
what I expected I guess, but it was nice when it actually did just work and I 
only had to make minimal tweaks.

But recently I've found my 4-year love affair with Gentoo just didn't seem to 
be there any more.  I was getting pissed off with compiling stuff all the 
time (at least in part because of electricity useage, which concerns both my 
bank balance and my eco-warrior side), and in many ways just found myself 
hankering for the ease of something like Ubuntu.

So with the move to a 64-bit machine, I thought I'd check out my options, 
rather than just immediately reaching for Gentoo x86_64.

Of course, there's actually no need for me to switch to 64-bit Linux - 32-bit 
works just fine on a 64-bit processor, and at the moment there are still a 
couple of small disadvantages to 64-bit (although they won't affect me).  
Ultimately there's seemingly not that much in it, but I wanted to set this up 
for the future, and the future is 64-bit, so that's where I've gone.

So, first stop - since I've been using Ubuntu Studio 32-bit 
(http://ubuntustudio.org/) on my laptop with a relative degree of success, I 
thought I'd see if there was a 64-bit edition - which there is.  But while 
reading reviews of it, I remembered that actually I'm not completely happy 
with Ubuntu Studio.  I think it's quite promising, but despite doing 
relatively little with it so far, I've already encountered a few seemingly 
silly problems which made me question whether it was what I really wanted to 
use.  I'm sure once it gets past it's teething stage, it'll probably improve, 
but at the moment I'm not quite convinced by it.

Ubuntu has certain limitations which have advantages for ease of use, but 
Ubuntu Studio trips over itself a bit and thus for me loses those advantages 
a fair bit, prompting me to ask whether it's actually worth it!?  (I'll admit 
it's a fine line, but I'm a perfectionist when it comes to my Linux boxes.)

I came across some reviews of 64studio (http://64studio.com/) which sounded 
very promising, so I decided to download it and give it a go.  It's Debian 
based, 64-bit, realtime kernel, comes with nice audio apps already installed.

I did my repartitioning beforehand to preserve my Gentoo install just in case, 
but the first thing that struck me about the 64studio install was that it was 
incredibly quick and easy - I was up and running in about 10 minutes or so, 
and with most of the software I wanted installed within about half an hour.  
I guess that's the beauty of Synaptic package manager - really nice tool.

But after a couple of days with 64studio, I realised that some of the stuff 
I've become accustomed to doing on Linux was kinda impossible to accomplish 
on 64studio.  This is because it's based on Debian Etch (stable), which while 
it's solid as a rock, only has older more tried-and-tested software.

I considered various options - trying to dist-upgrade 64studio to Lenny 
(Debian testing), but having looked into it a bit, basically decided that 
64studio wasn't right for me.  I will say that from my brief foray into it, 
it's really, really nice, and should definitely be considered as a 
front-runner for anyone who's serious about making music on a rock-solid 
Linux box.

But for me, music on Linux comes secondary to the other stuff I need to do for 
a living, and having become accustomed to things like GIMP 2.4 (64studio / 
Debian Etch only has GIMP 2.2, and there's pretty much no way around that 
because of the amount of other library upgrades required), I basically 
decided to look for something similar but a bit more cutting-edge.

Being a Gentoo person, I'm OK with the occasional breakage as long as things 
work about 98% of the time.  I don't really need the rock-solid-ness of 
Debian Etch or the hand-holding-ness of Ubuntu, so while contemplating the 
idea of giving Kubuntu (Hardy alpha6) a try anyway, I found out about Sidux 
(http://sidux.com/).

I was pretty excited at what I was reading!  Sidux is a spin-off of the 
Kanotix project - a slightly tamed version of Debian Sid (unstable).  It has 
the Debian way of doing stuff coupled with the edgyness of Sid, but tweaked a 
little and geared up for "mere mortals" to use - sounded almost perfect for 
me!  I found enough people saying it was actually very stable (at least for 
home desktop use) to convince me to give it a try.

I was slightly put off by the unpronouncable version names - seems the Sidux 
people are obsessed with the Greek alphabet, which initially made me wonder 
if it would turn out to be an annoying "L33t" distro.  But looking through 
other parts of the website, it seemed quite friendly and well documented, so 
I decided to download it and try it out.

The live CD worked great, and the install was even easier than 64studio.  I'm 
pleased to report that so far I'm extremely happy.  Admittedly it's early 
days yet - this is only the second day I've been using it - but so far it's 
great!

The one thing I slightly miss is Synaptic.  Basically, you can't use a 
graphical package manager with Debian Sid, because for various reasons 
(seemingly mostly around the speed the distro changes at) it causes problems 
and breaks things.

Apparently you can use Synaptic to find packages on Sid, but it's a bad idea 
to use it to install them.  However, I've found a package called kio-apt, 
which integrates apt-cache search into Konqueror, so you can still browse 
packages in a nice way, before diving off to the command line for apt-get 
installing - seems kinda safer, if you ask me!  :-)

So that brings us to now: me with a pretty-much completely set up Sidux box, 
which I'm thoroughly enjoying using.  I haven't got as far as doing music 
stuff on it yet - that's coming next.  For the essentials though, after a 
fair bit of post-install tweaking (it's not Ubuntu, that's for sure, but it's 
not Gentoo either!), it's all working really well.

For people who aren't afraid to get their hands a tiny bit dirty and want 
edgyness in binary form, Sidux would be well worth checking out.  It seems to 
tread a nice line somewhere between Gentoo and Ubuntu, which suits an 
intermediate Linux geek like me really well.

64studio is certainly a great project, and if you need stability and easy 
setup more than the latest versions of things, it would be well worth a look.

Ubuntu Studio - while it looks promising and certainly doesn't suck, I'm not 
convinced by it just yet, though I'll be keeping it on my laptop for now 
anyway.

I expect I'll still do most of my music work in Windows, but Linux has some 
pretty interesting music software available for it, and I hope as time goes 
on that'll get better and better and I'll use it more.  (In fact, I'm sure 
that this is already accellerating thanks to the influx of Linux users on 
Ubuntu.)

Anyone else using Sidux?

Thanks for reading this far!  ;-)

~Dave