hardbop200.com

It’s been a long time coming, but I can finally post that I have achieved a stable, mature Linux audio setup that works.

A little background first: For the past year or two I’ve been trying to find or build the perfect audio distribution. I’ve tried or dabbled in a little bit of everything: Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, Dyne:bolic, pure:dyne, Slitaz, grml, and have even gone so far as to try the Debian-Live scripts and semi-embedded distros, such as Slitaz. They all came up short in one way or another – too new or too old, not supported, requires too much time compiling applications by hand, etc.

Most of this investigation has been intermingled with moments of frustration and pure anger, and at times I would install Windows XP. Windows is great, don’t get me wrong, and to be fair when I was using Windows I never had the long setup and configure times that I do with Linux – just pop the .dll in the /vst folder and you’re golden – but I always felt like I was missing out on the power that the Unix philosophy can bring to a computing system. Moreover, I really would love to have a free system, partly because I love the notion of “free as in speech,” and also because I’m cheap.

But I digress…

During all of this, I tried 64Studio, an Ubuntu-based distribution targeted to pro-audio setups. I found the initial install and the user interface clunky and cumbersome, but in my research I noticed that they backport most of their packages to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04). This version of Ubuntu has long-term support, so it’s not about to go away anytime soon. I also began to notice that there were quite a few repositories out there that provided support for more modern applications to Hardy. With all of this knowledge in mind, I set forth to make Hardy my primary distribution of choice, and the dividends have been great. I would say that 90% of what I would like to use is supported out-of-the-box, and the other 10% is either so easily put together that I can’t complain about it, or is so “fringe” that it isn’t that big of a problem that it didn’t work. With all of this being said, here is a short list of what I did to get a decent system running in very high-level terms; no specific apt-get install commands here, just some general direction for those who might be in the same boat as I was.

Get the Ubuntu 8.04 minimal install CD:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

Install it to your system. You will need to install some packages to make the system usable, here is an incomplete list of the ones I like to install:

build-essential xorg fluxbox menu elinks links2 screen vim leafpad firefox-3.0

Now comes the fun part: We need to add the 64Studio backports repository to our install. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list as root and add this repo:

deb http://apt.64studio.com/backports hardy-backports main

Now we need to update and upgrade the system to make sure we are all on the same page:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Notice that I did NOT do apt-get dist-upgrade. I haven’t been brave enough to pull that trigger yet.

From this point, we need to build out our system for audio work. Your first order of business is to apt-cache search for linux-image and install the most recent multimedia kernel that you can find (I’m sorry that I don’t have the exact package name, but I believe it is linux-image-2.6.29-1-multimedia-686). Once that is done, then edit /etc/security/limits.conf and add these entries:


@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - memlock unlimited
@audio - nice -10


At this point I like to reboot into my new kernel.

Once all of this is done, it’s just a matter of getting the right applications. At bare minimum, I would start with these:

jackd qjackctl ardour-i686

There are tons of posts out there on the Internet about which audio applications are good to install. Personally, I really enjoy the dssi suite of applications, just do an apt-cache search dssi and see what comes up.

You can do other searches to see what interesting stuff is out there. Here are some ideas:

apt-cache search jack

apt-cache search synthesizer

apt-cache search midi

apt-cache search looper

There are probably many more. Remember, this is a free system, and there is nothing holding you back from trying all of them! But beware, sometimes you can become addicted to trying new things and never moving forward with actual production (I have fallen prey to this problem many times, and still fight it). Try to do your research and focus on one or two applications that are popular and learn them first. For example, ardour is a fabulous DAW application, and while there are others that are great and work well, it is a good idea to learn this one first.

An aside – there is no Linux equivalent to Ableton Live, so just resign yourself to that fact now. Also, while there are ways to run vst instruments in Linux, I would waste too much time up front with this idea. Better to get comfortable with the tools available than try to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I hope this mini-howto will help someone out there. If it helps you in any way, please leave a comment for others to see. If you have some additional comments or corrections, by all means let me know – I’ll be happy to take any advice I can get!