Hallo, Greg Reddin hat gesagt: // Greg Reddin wrote: > So, anyway, how are you guys handling these issues? Do you install > from scratch? I never reinstalled my Debian system from scratch in the last seven years. I once installed Debian 1.2 at that time, which didn't work out immediatly so it took my two or three re-installs. After those, everything was done with dpkg upgrades and later apt-get upgrades. A distribution (or OS like MS-Win) that requires reinstalls from scratch is fundamentally broken in my opinion. > 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? As you by now may guess, I didn't run anything else besides Debian for *years*, so I cannot comment on the other systems. But Debian and now the AGNULA enhanced Debian have never really failed me over all this time. Some reasons for this are: 1) dpkg/apt-get which are superior package management tools when it comes to upgrade stability, 2) a *huge* skilled and helpful user base. When things were about to break here because I ran Debian "unstable" (which isn't unstable in general at all), I always found some poor soul on the debian lists who had been through all this already and knew a solution or workaround. In these cases, often there were fixed packages already available, or I resorted to a downgrade which also is easy most of the time in Debian because of automatic dependency resolving by apt-get/dpkg. As I became quite familiar with the Debian tools over the years, I have found the system to be very flexible as well, much more so than eg. Suse. If I wanted to just use one package from another release, I could just use the Debian source package to build a matching binary for my machine. Or currently I am running several AGNULA packages here, which will eventually overwritten by packages from the main branch automatically when those offer newer versions of, say, Jack. In regard to "test" environments: I never had that. I like living on the edge ;) and it turned out, that this did work with Debian very well. Sometimes there are upgrades, that don't work out well at first, of course. Every distribution has these, but my impression is, that Debian has these less often and almost never with stable->stable upgrades. But as you currently have Redhat installed, it's probably easier to just use the Planet/Fedora instead of doing the switch to Debian (although this wouldn't be too difficult for you, I'm sure). ciao -- Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__
