With all the new releases of audio software of late and all the shift that's taking place among distros, I'm trying to devise a good upgrade path for my DAW. As it stands I'm running RedHat 9 with a patched kernel. I've installed all the audio software I use by building from scratch -- downloading, compiling, and installing individual packages. At this point, it has taken so much work to get my system where it is that I'm loathe to upgrade it. Yet, with new versions of Rosegarden, Muse, Ardour, and Jack coming out lately, I'd really like to take advantage of those new features. OTOH, I'm worried that an upgrade can cause problems with work that is in progress. An ideal world for me would be a fairly straightforward binary install process for the OS and most packages, with the capability to install "development" versions of those packages that I'm interested in playing with or contributing to. For example, suppose I found a bug in Ardour that I could patch. I'd like to be able to code, install, and test my patch without screwing up my existing system. I'd also like to be able to upgrade individual packages and back out the upgrade if it breaks something. It would be *really* cool to have something like a virtual machine where I could have a test environment and production enviornment on the same machine. Then I could get things running in the test environment and push them to production when I'm sure they are stable. Another issue is that I'm thinking of moving from RedHat, but I don't know where to move to. I tried Planet CCRMA for a while, but my dial-up made that prohibitive. I'm about to upgrade to broadband, so I may revisit that. So, anyway, how are you guys handling these issues? Do you install from scratch? Do you install audio on top of an existing distro? Which one? RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, SuSE, Gentoo, etc? Does Planet CCRMA work well for you? What about Agnula? How do you upgrade individual packages? How do you back out the upgrade if there's a problem? Do you manage a separate "test" environment to keep from bringing down your DAW? I know there's no single answer to these questions, and eventually, I'll just have to pick from all the equally viable choices. But I'd also like to learn from the wisdom of folks who have more experience with this -- find out what the pitfalls are with each choice. So I would be greatly appreciative of any suggestions you guys might have. Thanks, Greg __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
