minimal distribution - maximum sound??

[Hartmut Noack]

Am 17.12.2010 21:16, schrieb Mike Holstein:
> On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 12:18 PM, kirko birilli<whyshenwhy at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:
>
>> hi there,
>>
>> i would like to know if somebody got experience with running audio apps on
>> a small as possible distro tailor made for your own machines.i install
>> usually the whole lot and then just try to get things done.a friend of mine
>> uses his old laptop as kind of tekkno instrument.he got his sounds together
>> with pure data and uses the keyboard as kind of piano.he still got windoze
>> xp on it and i wonder if that doesn´t eat lots of power he could better use
>> for audio tasks.
>> so what are you doing to get the maximum out of your machines and is it
>> possible just to get a minimal install something like tiny core with 10mb
>> and add the rest after?

This might be a good idea but do not be fooled by things visible. It is 
an illusion to believe, that changing from KDE or GNOME to LXDE or 
Fluxbox will help a lot. It *can* save RAM but CPU-load and much more 
important: unwanted interruptions of jack will be reduced greatly by 
just changing the DE.
There are background-things like udev or network-manager, that produce a 
much bigger burden and they can run also if Fluxbox is up.

I dare to say: if you set up your system really carfully (rt-kernel, 
udev-rules, limits etc) you get better performance with a stripped-down 
KDE than someone who believes, just installing Lubuntu will do the trick.


>> i have got loads of old laptops around and would like to get them
>> swinging.any suggestions?
>> cheers
>> shen
>>
>> there is a really cool light-weight distro that i think you might want to
> look at for learning purposes.. http://dynebolic.org/ ...

Dynebolic really made the grade for me on older hardware (running 
Zynaddsubfx on a PII-Notebook with 128MB RAM...)

But it never was a real-world-distro it even lacks a package-management.

The smalles audio-distro I ever tested was bardix. It was Gentoo-based 
and came as a live-image about 100MB. The performance though, was not so 
much better than pure:dyne and it was grotesqly spartanic.



> i dont think you
> would want to actually use it right now because the packages are quite out
> of date, but it does *fly* on older hardware (and it flies like that from a
> live CD too)... in theory* you can just install ubuntu, normal vanilla
> ubuntu and take advantage of some meta-packages such as lubuntu-deskop or
> xubuntu-desktop and have LXDE or XFCE instead of gnome or KDE running. then,
> you could add whatever software from ubuntustudio (meta-packages, or just
> what you need). no reason why all of those packages wont run in LXDE and/or
> XFCE... OR you could just install xubuntu or lubuntu and use one of those
> versions as a 'base'... all the official variants use the same buntu repos
> as far as i know.
>
>>
>
> --
>> Ubuntu-Studio-users mailing list
>> Ubuntu-Studio-users at lists.ubuntu.com
>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-users
>>
>>
>
>