elrohir 0 Report post Posted May 12, 2007 I have, over the last few years, seen numerous complaints from newcomers to Linux over the lack of media support in Linux, even though it is present. They are just new, and don't know how to do things themselves. For a while now, I have been following a project called Ubuntustudio. It's based on Ubuntu, my favourite distro, and since it was released only this week, I had to try it. Now, since it's based on Ubuntu (and uses the same repositories as the Fiesty Fawn Ubuntu release), it's nice and stable (I haven't had a single problem yet), as well as being absolutely perfect for media editing. Cause that's what it's made for. Ironically, the site went down due to high traffic just after the release, though it is on several mirrors, as well as a torrent. Beware, however! This is NOT a livecd. It's the INSTALLATION dvd. It installs ubuntu studio on your system, without regard for the partitions it's overwriting. Not bad in itself, but kinda sucks for everything on that partition. I'll post my personal reactions here. Ubustu comes with the common *buntu apps - well, the common GNOME apps, really - or in other words, the Firefox(v.2), Gaim, GIMP and OpenOffice.org set. Just like Ubuntu, you have to replace evolution with thunderbird, but that's no big deal. So, on top of that, you get a full set of auido, image and video editing tools. There's the famous and awesome Inkscape, of course, as well Blender3D, various animation editors, as well as some other stuff that I personally would never use. Then there's the audio section. They decided to use both the standard ALSA/OSS as well as this awesome thing called JACK as audio plugins. This means that for normal use, you just boot normally, with ALSA, and listen to your nice music, watch your DVDs, w/e. If you want to get fancy, for example by plugging in an amp, then applying effects to it from your computer, you fire up the JACK server, and do it all from there. What's special is that it runs in a separate layer, so that all the programs that need the JACK server can share the same in/out put. It's pretty neat. I got addicted to "Hydrogen", this drum simulator program that actually works properly... Due to the Ubuntu/Canonical legalities, most propriety codecs aren't included in the install itself. But as soon as you try playing something that needs one, it lists the good codecs and you just tell it you don't give a s**t about the legal b$. If you specialise in a specific field of media, it has a choice during the installation process that asks you what groups of programs to install, which I thought was pretty neat. (I just chose them all). Speaking of the install, there was a slight quirk with the X server. (When something goes wrong for me, it's always X.) All I did was copy over the configuration file from a ubuntu installation (you can even boot from the livecd and copy the live xorg.conf from there onto the hard-drive). It booted perfectly, after that. The theme took some getting used to. About three hours of it. Less than it took me from Breezy to Dapper, so not bad at all. The theme seems to have taken some inspiration from Vista, but since Vista just ripped off Mac in the first place, I'll let that one pass. It does feel odd in the beginning, but trust me, it's well worth it. The installer was not a graphical one - I'm not sure whether it was meant to be or not, though it seemed to attempt to start a graphical server of some sort before resorting to ncurses. I presume that was for the same reason X didn't start after the install, whatever that reason may be. Even so, it was extremely easy, and I had a working system in under twenty minutes, including fixing X. Very respectable. Boot time is good, and other than that it's pretty much the same as the standard Fiesty Fawn install, just without the $H*TTI Feist partitioner. Wireless support looks good (I haven't tried connecting to a network yet, I use ethernet to exclusion of all else), with all the networks appearing in a little drop-down under the networking icon in the taskbar. Including some that Windows doesn't see, for some reason If you are looking to change to linux, this is the time to do it. The Ubuntuforums have a thread for it if there are issues, and ubuntustuidio.org should be up sooner rather than later. The posted pic was taken as soon as I installed (fixed X, started gaim... ) and is basically the first impression you get of ubustu... Questions, comments, concerns? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
