On Tuesday 01 April 2003 08:32, Daniel James wrote: > ...which is very easy to install. Don't forget that most computer users > have never compiled anything in their life. The expectation of end-user > kernel rebuilds should really be a thing of the past. Indeed, my goal when setting up Linux for end users is to try and make sure they never even see a command line. Musicians aren't geeks and neither are most corporate types. Slackware is great for when you have that one machine in your mom's basement and it doesn't matter to you to keep track of what file came from where or to be able to uninstall stuff cleanly. It's sort of the Windows model of installing software, only with source. Gentoo is sort of the best of both worlds, but I don't feel like waiting 36 hours for it to compile everything I need for a usable desktop, whether corporate or musical. Debian is nifty except for the installer. I understand they're working on it and maybe in another year I'll be able to recommend it to non-technical people. Lindows/Xandros/Lycoris are just too limited for musicians or for the kind of people who pay me to make Linux work for them. Red Hat is okay as a server distro but they just don't seem to understand the desktop and unless you're a power user who knows enough to install apt-rpm, you're stuck in dependency hell. I use and recommend Mandrake (but never switch to the latest and greatest until a month or two after it's out) because urpmi is sort of a nice compromise between plain RPM, and apt. Its installer is simpler than the various Windows installers and I can set up my own RPM repositories with automagical dependency checking that my users can set up and install packages without ever having to see a bash prompt. The only downside I can see to Mandrake is that they're in receivership right now and that makes them a big question mark for versions subsequent to 9.1. There are certainly problems even with the automagical dependency checking systems, like someone will build a package that needed some new obscure library that they had installed from cooker (the unstable Mandrake branch) or from source and didn't bother to provide an RPM for, but people generally find those pretty quick. There are lots more Mandrake urpmi sources than just what you find at Mandrake mirrors, to wit: http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/urpmiweb.php - make sure you click "show specific sources too" as it includes a lot more. A couple that aren't listed there include http://rpm.nyvalls.se/9.0/RPMS - thac's RPM's, a huge collection of audio apps and http://www.kudla.org/rpm/i586 - my own collection which isn't really audio related but as long as i'm mentioning sources... ;) Karel, I definitely feel your pain with regards to dependency hell, but I won't be running 9.1 until I think enough people have guinea-pigged it for me. If anyone running Mandrake 9.0 has problems with a particular audio app RPM I'd be happy to rebuild it, stick it in my repository and work out dependency issues with you. That way everyone (well, mdk 9.0 users) can benefit. Rob
