This is something that’s been cooking for a while now and we are finally ready to serve it up to a hungry world!

Highlights

Here’s the bullet points:

• Based on Ubuntu
• GNOME
• Includes Wine by default
• No Mono
• Some QT/KDE apps by default
• More you, less them

(More) In Depth

So, the basic idea is to build on top of a “de-corporatized” Ubuntu: we want to capture the strong parts of Ubuntu while being able to explore some areas that stock Ubuntu won’t go, and maybe “un-do” a few questionable decisions.

This first release – n1, codenamed “Albedo” – is a very basic starting point where we can get our tools and starting infrastructure in place, gauge interest and welcome others, clarify our goals and prepare for the 10.04 release of Ubuntu as the foundation for the next Netrunner release, n2.

On a personal note

This is an exciting undertaking, and a bit scary because I know nothing about putting together a distro! Fortunately we have top men working on it now! Who? TOP. MEN.

I invite you all to help us shape Netrunner into a great distro, and I especially welcome pointers from those with experience!

We’ll have more details later, but I wanted to get the announcement out there today while it is still March, rather than tomorrow!

Linkage

Netrunner Home Page

Netrunner Forums

Netrunner on Launchpad

Linux Arpeggiators, Part 1

Reading Mr. Phillips’ excellent articles and working on some musical stuff recently got me to thinking about back when I first moved over to Linux.

One of my major concerns was on the audio production front. Under Windows, I was using Cakewalk Sonar for demo production; it was a decent program that I knew fairly well. A friend used it (which is why I took it up), so we could exchange projects and so forth.

The exchange process never worked perfectly. We didn’t have the exact same plug-ins, samples, and other such supporting doo-dads so even though we were running the exact same version, there were always workarounds and glitches every time we exchanged the project.  Nothing that stopped work, but it was always a bit annoying. Furthermore, when we flew the demo tracks into the real studio (with of course used ProTools), they only wanted the raw audio anyway – a real engineer is not going to want your reverb and EQ settings.

The realization that it probably wouldn’t matter much in terms of collaborating or exporting my work was encouraging, but I was still a bit worried about moving my workflow entirely over to Linux.

Well Worry Not
There are 3 main programs that I rely on in Linux:
Ardour – The DAW proper. Very full-featured, well designed, constantly updated.

Ardour

Ardour is a fantastic DAW and I have no real complaints – outside of the routine complaints engineers always have about their workstations: they can’t read our minds. (I greatly boast here by implying I am an audio engineer. I merely play one at home.)

The one thing that a newcomer is sure to notice is that effect interfaces are not modeled after real-world products, but instead use sliders and other computer widgets. Nothing you can’t quickly adjust too, but it will throw you off a bit a first, and admittedly it’s not as shiney as those UIs that look like real rack-mounted gear.

I like working with a lot of tracks. Even for little home demo stuff, it’s nothing for me to have 8 tracks of just guitars, with the whole thing having 30+ tracks. Ardour has the routing and busing options to comfortably handle projects with a large number of tracks. There is a little bug/glitch in how they re-sort when a track is added or deleted that I hope gets resolved.

I also can’t wait for Ardour v3 – the changes are way exciting!

Rosegarden – MIDI sequencer (and more, but I mostly use the sequencing side of the house)

Rosegarden

Now, Sonar had a very decent MIDI sequencer built-in, but Ardour does not. This complicates the set up a bit, but sound dudes are old hands at patching devices so once you grasp the concept of routing sound through Jack, everything makes sense again.

Rosegarden is my sequencer of choice. One important feature to me is that it allows me to work in “piano roll” mode or regular music notation. There just seems to be times where one is much much better than the other and I like the ability to switch between them easily.

Hydrogen – Drum machine. I never record drums for demos.  Who has time to mic up all those drums? Plus, you have to worry about the noise. And the drummer. Bleh.

Hydrogen

I remember when I first was patching up Hydrogen through Jack and the channel names weren’t listed. That is if I had the Kick Drum on Ch. 1, that channel would only say “Ch. 1″ in Jack. This is quite annoying to xref yourself when you have a dozen or more channels.

Lo and behold, I went out and got the latest version (at that time) from the site and channel names (“Kick Drum”) were exposed to Jack. Very nice! Been a big Hydrogen fan ever since.

I mainly use Hydrogen as a sampler – meaning I use Rosegarden to sequence the drums, and just send that through Hydrogen for the drum sounds. Hydrogen can be used in a more traditional drum machine mode where you actually sequence the drums in a grid-based view. There’s nothing wrong with that, and Hydrogen does it well, but I just happen to prefer having all my MIDI “scored” in Rosegarden.

Other stuff

There are a host of smaller tools (QJackCtl is indispensable and worth special mention) that help round out a project studio, but the biggest shift in thinking was from running one program, to connecting multiple ones together via Jack.

It’s funny because in that sense even GUI-heavy big applications mirror the “do one thing and do it well” Unix philosophy.

I’m interested in Mr. Phillips articles because most of my past efforts have been more in the traditional metal genre, but I’m thinking about playing around with a more electronic-music sort of thing and would like to put together a Reason-style setup. I played with Reason one time and was quite impressed and would be very interested in having something like that under Linux.

I’ve been looking for a media streaming solution: there is a scenario where I need to stream audio/video from a Linux box to the iPhone. The server end can be nerdy, but the client end needs to be simple and for non-technical users.

I had been having pretty good results with media hive, but unfortunately I ran into a situation where I needed to stream video that was not in a format that the iPhone would recognize (not H.264 I assume). I was also having some problems with the client UI – it was a bit confusing.

The Solution?

In my searching I ran across Air Video. It handles the transcoding on the fly for videos, and has a very simple iPhone interface. The drawback here? The server is only for Mac/Win. Boo.

On a lark, though I decided to check out the forums and found a very interesting thread entitled “linux support?” I encourage you to read a bit of it. It goes something like this:

User1: Nice app, I like it. Is there a linux port planned?

Developer: Probably not, Linux is a very small user base.

User2-3: Maybe not as small as you think, I could use it too.

Developer: My site visitor logs show very few Linux visitors. Also, packaging for various distros seems like a lot of work.

Users4-10: I sure would like a native linux version. Will it work in wine? I could help with a native version. etc.

It goes on like this for a bit, with more people coming on helping each other (and the developer) and expressing their desire for a linux port. Eventually, the developer says:

We could release a CLI application. However it would be without remote support, at least for the first release. Also we would need someone to build the ffmpeg, faac (encoder) and mp4creator (required for offline conversion, could be tricky to build)

And you know what? He did!

How cool is that!

Great Success

This isn’t a perfect solution for my particular need – I’m still looking for something more like media hive but with transcoding-on-the-fly, and a little cleaner client UI – but that’s not the point here.

The point is so many times I’ve seen Linux users express interest in a port only to be dismissed out of hand. I was very glad to see a developer make the effort.

I also found it funny that the Linux users and the developer quickly agreed that a CLI-only version was just fine and dandy!