Story: Windows to linux the first six months

[studio32]

Windows to linux the first six months

Like many people, I have recently become frustrated (or, rather, appalled) by the WinXP/Vista saga, and have begun to explore the world of other operating systems. For instance, I have noticed when doing sound for electronic musicians, the universe is very neatly divided into people who perform with Macintoshes and people who apologize to the audience for their technical difficulties. Enter Linux: you can get a version of Linux which runs on franken-computers, Macs, game machines, PDA’s, cellphones, and everything in between. Because I’m more interested in working on my media projects that turning myself into a computer lab-rat, I started with Debian, followed with Ubuntu, and have now gone to the trouble of buying an optimized machine online - which should arrive this week.

So here’s the back story. In the two years I’ve been working with Win XP, circumstance has forced me to reinstall my system from scratch several times. This has been gruelling and frustrating. When Microsoft began trying to ram Vista down our throats, all the street-talk I was hearing said that if I wanted my computer to record music, then Vista simply wouldn’t work, due to over-zealous copyright protection coding and other issues. I later heard about memory managment hassles which were crippling people’s machines. I already had a hunch this would be an embarrassment. I was already beginning to feel that getting a computer to record music was like teaching the proverbial pig to sing. Multi-channel real-time audio just works better with coprocessing, and then there’s the issue of the control interfaces, and the silly-looking patchbay computers have. Anyhow, enough people suggested it that I finally decided to give Linux a shot.

I fit in with the Linux concept philosophically. The nice thing about community-developed open-source software is that there is no overlord telling us we can’t have a feature that we want in our software, or that software makers are charged with protecting us from ourselves and our dark content-creating and changing inclinations. I also prefer a software platform that isn’t marketed like a protection racket. I don’t find it likely that I will ever be much of a programmer, but as a writer, I see opportunities in the documentation projects for the thousands of software packages available for Linux. The reality is that Linux software ranges in maturity from the terrible two’s all the way to venerable competitors for popular programs.

In my experience with Linux, I eventually reached the point of taking measures to see how much abuse I could subject it to, via exposure to questionable software and websites. Is Linux unbreakable? Does Ubuntu ‘just work?’ Not quite. So far, the reliability of the software seems to relate to the influence of companies like Novell, Sun Microsystems, and Canonical - to name a few - who have shepherded some of the software projects involved.

When I started with Debian, I tried out the Gnome and KDE desktop environments and was maybe over-impressed with KDE, although both environments have numerous features which make me giggle at every version of Windows I have seen. Debian leads one to spend a fair amount of time poking around in the command-line environment, and I’m still not ready to jump into that pool at the deep end. So I switched to Ubuntu.

As a media-artist, my interest is focused on media applications, but for the average user, Ubuntu offers basic functionality - for free - which outshines many of the programs people pay for in the Windows world. For instance, I find Firefox runs faster in Ubuntu. OpenOffice which I have been using since the Windows days, is more versatile and universal than MSOffice could ever hope to be. Evolution is the Gnome email client, which can harmonize with several accounts, and contains a calendar program which is quite helpful and quick to work with, although I still prefer Kalendar in the KDE environment. I admit I find the media players a little buggy and unreliable, but my system configuration was probably at fault at least some of the time.

There is a version of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Studio which is designed for multi-media work, but I made the mistake of trying to recreate it from a vanilla installation. For one thing, I would have needed to say magic words to get it to talk to my Tascam recording-interface. I was already frustrated with the interface, so I looked at the forums, and dropped some money on a Lexicon Alpha interface. That got me part way home - just plug it in and turn it on in Audacity, but I should have spent enough to get one with phantom power. Ardour is the major DAW software available for Linux, with many features rivalling the best DAW software out there, but it runs using a combination of interface software which is poorly documented, and sometimes non-functional in the vanilla installation I tried. There is also a collection of video editing software in various stages of development, and graphics packages which I already use for all of my visual design work: GIMP for photo-editing, and Inkscape for vector graphics, which runs on all platforms.

There is a drum-machine program called Hydrogen, which I feel is superior to Fruity-Loops for natural sounding drums. although I feel it could be more flexible in combining and editing instruments for drumkits. There are also several synthesizer and sequencing programs, and a mastering program called Jamin which is hard to beat. As for processing and effects, I don’t think it would be possible to become familiar with all of the available plug-ins in one lifetime.

But then I got hit with a line-surge. All I’ve got left is a pile of drives and burners, and a laptop running dual boot to get me through until the new one comes in. When it does, I will try to become involved in the documentation projects of several programs, and will likely begin producing media which takes me out of the singer-songwriter idiom for awhile. I can’t wait to get started.

http://morleyblog.wordpress.com/2008/07 ... ix-months/