> From what I see on the CCRMA site. looks like they stay as current as > possible...I think apt is what they use? Is it relatively free from > dependency hell with lots of server repositories?... > What about Suse packages? If you install the pacages that come with SuSE (tons and tons... and huge variety), you may never have a problem. Only several times (in 5 years using SuSE) have I found a program to not install correctly. *All* dependencies are met. And it even lists what dependencies are being installed *along* with the original program. ... Oh yea... I forgot... you have to click "accept" to install (hehe). Don't forget to click "accept" (hehe) Most of the (non) audio apps I've been using are out of the box. But don't underestimate how much (audio) work you can get done if you have other things in place. Audio is my primary activiy, but that spills into writing a front end... which spills into needing a good text editor for writing the tcl/tk scripts... which spills into creating buttons and images for the front end... And all I need to do all of (the above) came with SuSE. I'm looking in the directory were I build new programs. They are mostly audio apps. But there's a lot of programs that came with SuSE that will probly not need to be updated... there's gui "port connectors" like kaconnect (for midi connections), QJackConnect (for jack connections) and other smaller (but time saving) progams that are ready to go. All those are run out of the box. Oh... so does QJackCtrl for easy starting, stopping and configuring of jack parimeters. The irony is that when it came time to write a script that extracts information from an aconnect command, having kaconnect at my fingertips helped familiarize me with how things work with the alsa sequencer ports. It didn't make me lazy. It just helped gave me an important window to look into to get a grasp on the alsa sequencer ports. Even man pages make sence to me (hehe). I'm not a fanatic about this. I just want you to know one person's experience with a certain distrob. Rocco