[PlanetCCRMA] itlinux to rh90planet success story

[Kai Vehmanen]

Hello all,

so far I haven't had much chance for really testing Planet, as most of my
machines are based on ancient distros, which I've kept up-to-date the
goold old manual-compile (aka the hard ;)) way.  Now I finally had the
possibility to really test Planet.

Case 1 - Converting my old laptop

I have an old laptop that has ITLinux (an old Finnish Linux distro based
on RH62) installed on it. Additionally, a) the laptop's cd-drive is broken
and b) has lots of custom software compiled from source, so a
clean-install of another distro is just not an option.

Well, what I did was install apt, and then gradually update the system to
RH9 (ITLinux6.2 -> RH73 -> RH8 -> RH9), and then install the full Planet
set on it. And wow, it works! I had already lost hope on using the laptop
for any audio stuff (it also has a very small harddrive, so compiling big
apps/libs is difficult).

The upgrade part didn't go 100% smoothly, but nothing really major. The
biggest road bump was rpm breakage when going from RH8 to RH9. At one
point in the install rpm started giving me segfaults for all operations.  
I had to compile rpm-4.1 (rh8 level) from source, use it to install
rpm-4.2 from RH9 rpms, and then I could continue with the RH9 install.:) I
probably could have avoided this somehow with some googling, but oh well,
was still fixable.

Case 2 - Linux audio demo with Planet

I showed a small demo of Linux audio Wednesday this week, and Planet was
again just the right tool for the job. I could demo low-latency operation
on a laptop without practically any need for manual tuning, and of course,
a huge set of apps to show. Really nice!

...

So to wrap it up -- big thanks to Fernando and others for bringing us
Planet! As a developer I don't want to be too partial to any distro, but
Planet definitely is the perfect match for many uses, there's no question
about it!

-- 
 http://www.eca.cx
 Audio software for Linux!