Ubuntu OS

Looking to change over to a different operating system or atleast partion off some my drive and run a secondary OS. A friend has pointed me in the direction of Ubuntu a Unix based open source OS.

Anyone ever used this?

Any other suggestions?

Ubuntu Wiki

Used it a very little bit just for trying it out. Feels a lot like Mac OS X to me. Guess it's pretty cool.

hmmm i have a shitty controller that's USB but uses a driver to look like midi.

i wish there was something like NDISwrapper for midi.

unless there is.

Used it for a while, didn't stick.

  acridavid said:

Used it a very little bit just for trying it out. Feels a lot like Mac OS X to me. Guess it's pretty cool.

My main concern was that it wouldn't run any of the audio software that I've got or even recognise my BCD but that doesn't seem to be a problem. What size partition did you run it on? Thinking maybe a 10 or 15 GB.

  impakt said:

Used it for a while, didn't stick.

What didn't you like about it mainly? Was stability ever a problem or just the general feel of it?

Mostly the general feel and the fact that I can't run all the x86/win applications that I need.

It's worth noting that I used the netbook version of it.

Jujst wanted to point you here Ubuntu Studio. I haven't used it myself but was just talking to someone I met about moving to Ubuntu and told him that I produced music. I'm about to be getting a laptop and I want to try my hand @ a live show eventually. I am between getting a nice PC laptop for around $900 and using this and moving to a tracker or getting a new macbook pro and learning logic. I have the money (thank you student loans) but mac's are just so expensive...

  impakt said:

Mostly the general feel and the fact that I can't run all the x86/win applications that I need.

if you want to move to linux you have to find the open source versions of these! It sucks to have to change the way you do things, but @ this point I am looking forward to it. I have been making music pretty much the same way for about 6 years.

Had a look at the studio version I think I might go with that. Only problem is I want to run it parallel to Windows XP as a fall back. Will studio create a partition like Wubi would or is that something I need to do myslef?

  Bad Influence said:

Had a look at the studio version I think I might go with that. Only problem is I want to run it parallel to Windows XP as a fall back. Will studio create a partition like Wubi would or is that something I need to do myslef?

Okay, word of warning. Linux sucks for audio. Audio on linux is the biggest clusterfuck of opensource projects all trying to do the same thing at once in a different way, and then projects that are bridges between these. There are so many attempts at layers of abstraction to the now standard ALSA that different distributions use different setups which are all broken in some way. Now I'm not saying Ubuntu Studio isn't going to work out of the box or anything, in fact I would bet they have it figured out pretty well, but as soon as your try to use a few packages or binaries which are not part of the official repositories, you very well could run into problems.

My guess is that Ubuntu Studio, if they are doing things right, is set up with some kind of realtime kernel, or using the realtime LSM (probably not actually as I think it is deprecated). This coupled with JACK as an abstraction layer will allow you to have pretty good audio performance with low latency if there are good linux drivers for your interface(JACK is a bit complicated but is the most reliable interface for dealing with high quality realtime audio and mixing and is actually pretty cool). There are a few decent sequencers for linux that come with Ubuntu Studio, I never use them though. As far as commercial apps go you have EnergyXT2(which is a little broken, although I use it), and ReNoise. Now it is possible to use Wine(windows (non?)emulator) to run windows apps using wineasio.dll to create a fake asio driver which interfaces with jack, but it is shoddy at best and I finally figured out it was best that I just stick with windows in order to use these apps.

But to answer your question, yes, it will be able to install and keep your windows partition intact. I would recommend you pop in the live CD, open up gParted, and resize your windows partion so that you have a good amount of room on it, but also enough for a new linux partition. Then tell ubuntu studio to install on the empty space in the installer. Ubuntu will set up your bootloader for you to dual boot so don't worry about that. Again though, the important part is that you give windows enough space for future work, unless you plan on deleting the linux partition pretty soon.

I have been using Ubuntu for a couple years and I love it.

ALSA works fine with my usb-midi adapters.

  Bubba69 said:

Okay, word of warning. Linux sucks for audio. Audio on linux is the biggest clusterfuck of opensource projects all trying to do the same thing at once in a different way, and then projects that are bridges between these. There are so many attempts at layers of abstraction to the now standard ALSA that different distributions use different setups which are all broken in some way. Now I'm not saying Ubuntu Studio isn't going to work out of the box or anything, in fact I would bet they have it figured out pretty well, but as soon as your try to use a few packages or binaries which are not part of the official repositories, you very well could run into problems.

The abstraction is what I really love about it. I guess this is more important to me because I am writing my own sequencer in c++. Before that I was using PureData. But if you're planning on just making more straightforward music I'm sure that their are a million trackers and cubase clones out there. Like he said, if you want to use non-ubuntu supported software, there will be a learning curve. You'll have to learn how to compile programs or tweak linux to get something to work proplerly. If you're patient and have access to google, this shouldn't be much of a problem. However, there are a lot of really great programs already available in the ubuntu repositories. You should just try it out

plus you can always stick WINE on it and use Windows apps anyways.

Had a spin on my mates laptop using Ubuntu, think I like it. Defragting my hard drive and looking to a dual boot using the live disc i've downloaded. I'll post back aslong asnothing goes horrificly wrong.

you can install ubuntu like you would any other program within windows now using wubi, which is bundled

it's incredibly easy

check linux mint - even better imo