[PlanetCCRMA] Future OS direction

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 08:49:44 -0700 (PDT), Mike Witt
<mike.witt@computer-arts.net> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I hope this is an appropriate list to ask a non-technical question.
> If not, someone please redirect me.
> 
> I'm new here. I've been using "Logic" on a PowerBook for some time,
> and I'd like to move my musical activities to an Open Source based
> system. I've been looking at PlanetCCRMA and I'm curious about the future
> OS strategy. I'm not completely clear about what's going on with
> Fedora, so I might have this wrong, but it appears that it is only
> a "temporary" measure to support Red Had Linux with updates for
> a while.
> 
> If that is correct, then can someone tell me what the long term plan
> is for PlanetCCRMA? If I'm wrong about Fedora, then perhaps I could
> get some advice about how best to start putting together a system
> to run CCRMA. Should I try to find some RD9 CDs and install them
> and then update from Fedora?
> 
> Once again, if these questions are too basic for this list, I
> apologize, and perhaps someone could point me to a better source of
> information.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -Mike

Mike,
   Perfectly cool questions. 

   As I see Fedora, it's addressing individual user's a bit better
than Redhat's corporate strategy of the last few years. Redhat is now
more focused on server apps and corporate customers and isn't allowing
themselves to be distracted by individual users.

   Individual users didn't always get a good shake from Redhat anyway.
It was a fine product, but they pushed for money to get updates
efficiently, etc., and I think in the end the popularity of the
distribution became it's own downfall.

   Fedora seems to build on the Redhat technology, but it appears
(from the outside) like it's in the hands of a set of managers that
are interested in the end-user/workstation user. Updates seem to be
handled quite cleanly now. I haven't had many delays using the update
agent.

   I also think that of the larger distros around right now - my
incomplete list would be Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Suse - that either
Fedora or Suse would be the best for a new Linux user, and since you
want to do audio there's no discussion really - Fedora is the right
one for you. Just my 2 cents.

   I started as a Redhat user (well, sort of...) and switched mostly
to Gentoo about 18 months ago. I still run one RH9 audio machine and
have recently set of a couple of my dual boot machines to use FC2 on a
part time basis. My wife and son have moved to a mostly Linux world
using FC2. I like the distro. It's clean, pretty easy to manage, and
with Fernando's help for the audio side it's a great place to play.

   Give it a shot. You'll learn a bit, get a good taste of Linux, and
(assuming you are x86 for this venture) probably not have too much
trouble with the hardware configuration part using FC2.

Cheers,
Mark