AV Linux MX Edition 23.1 progress

[GMaq]

Hi AVL'ers and LM's!

Screenshot from Live ISO boot:

shot-2023-12-07_19-41-33.resized.jpg (123.88 KiB) Viewed 116735 times

Full size: http://bandshed.net/images/screenshots/ ... -41-33.jpg

It's been a busy couple of weeks and the past few days have closed the gap considerably on getting the next AV Linux MX Edition ISO out the door (based on Bookworm/MX-23). Things were almost ready to deploy and the release of PipeWire 1.0.0 forced me to to do a big rethink about PipeWire and with some help from @dolphin_oracle I've managed to get a pretty good live PipeWire setup going, a last crucial piece will be to have PipeWire 1.0.0 on the Live ISO (right now the testing phase has been the default Debian 0.3.65 version) and that is in the works and so far testing with installing PipeWire 1.0.0 from MX-Test (installed afterward) it's looking very promising! Big shoutouts go to @Stevo and @timkb4cq for getting a lot of great AV updates into the MX Repos and also @Melber for taking my sharp-sticks-and-flint PipeWire metadata tool and making it both look good and function well!

A LOT has changed!

• Enlightenment + Thunar + many new handy custom actions.
• Custom Actions also for Enlightenment File Manager!
• An uncharacteristic light and modern palette for Enlightenment (with classic dark skeumorphic options!)
• 4K ready (I've been testing in 4K and Enlightenment looks great and scales very well (unlike XFCE4...)
• Liquorix 6.6.3 Kernel
• PipeWire JACK all set up by default, cold boot, start Reaper/Ardour/Mixbus with 'JACK' backend and get to work!
• A suite of handy PipeWire tools (including qpwgraph) to ease the transition from JACK..
• Additions of Openshot and all the major DAW's and NLE's have been updated + loads and loads of fresh Plugins
• Added Tonetwist, SocalLabs WaveTable, ChowDSP, Vaporizer2... maybe more (I'm losing track..)...?
• As usual yabridge, YADbridge and Wine-Staging all ready to host your Windows VST Plugins
• We lose WineASIO, it is broken upstream with Wine 8.2+ and TBH I'm tired of chasing it..
• Fully functional and supported Ardour 8.1 version from ardour.org and Demo versions of Reaper 7 and Harrison Mixbus 9.2
• Lots of hidden Easter Eggs!

TODO, The switch to Enlightenment and PipeWire has made my established User Manual pretty obsolete, I'm considering a Video User Manual but whether it Text or Video the documentation will be a killer..

Beta 1 Test ISO's hopefully coming soon, too soon to tell if we'll get this baby under the Christmas Tree this year or not...

Comments and Questions welcomed, aside from PipeWire upgraded to 1.0.0 to be clear I consider this point of development to be frozen, the changes and improvements so far have been hard fought and I need to move my focus toward documentation...

Best, Glen

[varpa]

Wow,all that sounds great. Looking forward to it! Will Jack be an option or is it Pipewire-only?

[GMaq]

Wow,all that sounds great. Looking forward to it! Will Jack be an option or is it Pipewire-only?

Hi varpa!

My feeling is if I'm going PipeWire I'm going all in on PipeWire.. if I was going to keep JACK and it's pre-configuration and tools then I just would have stayed with Pulse/JACK/pajackconnect (which always worked perfectly for me.. ). PipeWire is a whole new frontier and time will tell how good it's JACK implementation is but I will leave the Audio server cocktails for people to mix on their own I think. The amount of time waffling back and forth and testing PipeWire and then being frustrated with it and eventually coming to terms with it's inevitability has been a real buzzkill..

[alex stone]

Glen, I'm rather fond of the current arrangement using JACK as the core of my setup. While I appreciate time marches on, and waits for no user, I ask the following:

1) If (and at the moment, it's likely) I remove pipewire and just stick with native JACK, will the pipewire deb package(s) remove a lot of dependencies/apps I will still use? We've seen this with other apps in the past, where seemingly unrelated cross dependency apps and utilities are removed without users understanding why.

However,

2) I trust your judgement on this. Has your testing of pipewire convinced you beyond doubt, that it's (more or less) up to par now, for running a complete studio setup such as yours (and mine)?

Thanks for the update. I'm looking forward to installing the latest AVL-MXDE.

Alex.

[sjzstudio]

Great news. Good job. Happy, I can make a donation again and again and again.

Here's a wonderful Christmas song for you, which I mixed with my current AV Linux MX-21.3 and Mixbus 32 C
https://youtu.be/AfSxpJXHohY?si=-oshAFwqpNfslKbe

This distro from Glen can do anything if you learn to use it well

[dan_flash]

Nice work Glen and great news on the update.

I've never used AV Linux (wanted to try in the past but could never get the live ISO to boot from USB and can't remember why) but I've always admired your work here and that of others who contribute in other ways. So nice one man

[GMaq]

Glen, I'm rather fond of the current arrangement using JACK as the core of my setup. While I appreciate time marches on, and waits for no user, I ask the following:

1) If (and at the moment, it's likely) I remove pipewire and just stick with native JACK, will the pipewire deb package(s) remove a lot of dependencies/apps I will still use? We've seen this with other apps in the past, where seemingly unrelated cross dependency apps and utilities are removed without users understanding why.

However,

2) I trust your judgement on this. Has your testing of pipewire convinced you beyond doubt, that it's (more or less) up to par now, for running a complete studio setup such as yours (and mine)?

Thanks for the update. I'm looking forward to installing the latest AVL-MXDE.

Alex.

I think it will be worth your while to give pipewire-jack a full evaluation, my needs are vastly different than your needs and I've always worked with hardware mixers and hardware monitoring so screwing latency down as tight as possible isn't something I ever need. I also use very modest amounts of MIDI tracks (although that is changing). To be clear it's not like you can't install and use JACK, in fact for example if you install Qtractor it's going to pull in jackd whether you need it or not. The issue is what the system will point to for the JACK implementation, by default the next AVL will have the system linking applications looking for JACK to PipeWire so if you want to use 'old' JACK then it will most likely require unlinking and resetting the system to use 'libjack' which will then force you to access 'pipewire-jack' by prepending your program launcher with the 'pw-jack' wrapper.

[GMaq]

Great news. Good job. Happy, I can make a donation again and again and again.

Here's a wonderful Christmas song for you, which I mixed with my current AV Linux MX-21.3 and Mixbus 32 C
https://youtu.be/AfSxpJXHohY?si=-oshAFwqpNfslKbe

This distro from Glen can do anything if you learn to use it well

Hi, your support is very much appreciated!

Great production and mix on the Christmas song!

[glowrak guy]

Hi, and thanks for helping the curious to know what's shaking! The good news is we can have multiple AVLinux setups,
so progress does not have to adversely effect existing usage.

It would be cool if one can remove pipewire using synaptic, without removing any typical dependencies.
And then have synaptic able to install a packaged pa-jack-connect setup.

Not your ballywick, but there is also a pesky issue with heavily nested preset menus in Surge and some other important instruments,
where only the first menu items are accessed from top down, and the lower ones vanish when entered. They become an arcade event
trying to access them from the sides instead of the normal top-down nesting routes. Maybe you know somebody at MX
that works in that realm, or knows those that do? I tried unsuccessfully to post a bug at wineHQ despite having an account.

Don' let that record button assume room temperature

Cheers

[GMaq]

It would be cool if one can remove pipewire using synaptic, without removing any typical dependencies.
And then have synaptic able to install a packaged pa-jack-connect setup.

I don't really get into that part of things, even MX is very careful about being compliant with the Debian mothership. As mentioned above introducing 'old' JACK ('JACK Classic'..?) to a system with PipeWire doesn't cause any harm, in my experience where things get in a tangle is with 'pulseaudio-modules-jack' and 'pipewire-jack' conflicting with each other.. Anyway... my part is to supply something that works OOTB for most Users and I'll leave the special edge-cases to the advanced Users with the usual warning "if you break it you get to keep the pieces"..

As far as Surge... isn't there a native Linux build? If there are UI problems with the Windows build on Linux why not use the Linux version..?

[bluzee]

It should not be necessary to remove Pipewire just disable the service so it doesn't run.

[Impostor]

It should not be necessary to remove Pipewire just disable the service so it doesn't run.

But I understand the sentiment of wanting to be able to remove stuff which isn't actually used. For example, I (try to) do that with everything bluetooth related, since my PC doesn't even have the necessary hardware. So I regard all bluetooth packages as unwanted bloat. But of course, something or other always seems to have a hard dependency on some bluetooth package, for whatever reason. I hate that.

[thetotalchaos]

It should not be necessary to remove Pipewire just disable the service so it doesn't run.

But I understand the sentiment of wanting to be able to remove stuff which isn't actually used. For example, I (try to) do that with everything bluetooth related, since my PC doesn't even have the necessary hardware. So I regard all bluetooth packages as unwanted bloat. But of course, something or other always seems to have a hard dependency on some bluetooth package, for whatever reason. I hate that.

I know what you mean. Just make sure that there aren't any bluetooth processes running needlessly. Or any needless processes for that matter. When i am into recording mode, i like to execute a personalized script, that ends any needless process.
There is a great example in https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/system_configuration

PS: @GMaq I already allocated 40G on my SSD drive for AVL-23.1. Thank you very much, for the all the great Linux Audio projects, throughout the years.

[GMaq]

Thanks @thetotalchaos

By the way for those looking to cut out unneeded or unwanted system services MX Linux now has their own MX-Service-Manager as part of their excellent MX-Tools that is very useful, it will come with the rest of the usual MX Tools in AVL-MXe-23

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[glowrak guy]

I look forward to testing/using the new version. I've got a box labeled 'Broken Parts' in case my tampering goes awry.
Wouldn't be the first time . Got me some survival skills now, and a stack of iso dvd's for time travel.
Cheers