Linux & Midi Building a Linux box to work with MIDI

I am working on building an old 486 (with a pentium overdrive chip) and I plan on installing Debian from source. I would like to know what is the best software to get so I can use this box for working with MIDI. I have a Casio keyboard, and I want to be able to both record music via MIDI, and be able to control the keyboard from the computer. Thank You for your assistance.

I am working on building an old 486 (with a pentium overdrive chip) and I plan on installing Debian from source.  I would like to know what is the best software to get so I can use this box for working with MIDI.  I have a Casio keyboard, and I want to be able to both record music via MIDI, and be able to control the keyboard from the computer.  Thank You for your assistance.

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I think you should try XMMS. It support many file format (included MIDI). I think you should visit SourceForge.netto find more program to Record MIDI via Keyboard.

If you don't have experience in Linux and don't know your comp by heart, I wouldn't go with Debian to be honest. It's a pretty tricky one if you haven't done it before.My suggestion Fedora, an older Red Hat, Gentoo is nice too. You don't really *need* extra's, MIDI is fully supported in just about ANY Linux distro (although the textual only probably doesn't LOL). Just made sure you get the MIDI Player and Arts sound server for KDE, those are the best tools. XMMS is great, you don't hear me moan about that one, I use it. But for sound recording in MIDI and more options for channels etc, I think KDE sound players are your best option.

Heh, YOU try running Fedora on a 486... It won't be pretty... if it runs at all... If you want to do MIDI on low-powered Linux, you should be sure that you have a real hardware MIDI card. For a 486, an AWE32 is about as good as you can get, and that's not half bad. Even if you just want console mode, you should be able to get a text-mode MIDI player... I know I had one at one point. Rosegarden is a good MIDI editor for people who don't have a system powerful enough for KDE or GNOME.

I agree with moonwitch except for the gentoo option.Gentoo is a very fast distro, but its a from source distro. my Amd64 3400+ takes a good 6 hours to compile everything i need from a stage3 install..a 486 would probably take all week.how about slackware ? (but only if you have *nix experiance)KDE would be good for midi as moonwitch said, however dont use KDE for desktop.use a window manager such as IceWM / Fluxbox or somthing similar.you can still use KDE programs within them like Arts and XMMS, but using kde as a desktop manager will not be pretty on a 486.

you cant expect any linux-gui to run properly on a 486 which were released near 1991 i think. Console is the way to go with those oldtimers . You could take any distro and strip the GUI and all graphical stuff from installing, using only the console based programs.

Most modern distros won't even work with a 486. They need at least a Pentium 1 to even execute the code. I'd say go with an older version of SuSE or something. Just make sure you have Rosegarden, that program I mentioned earlier. X11 will work on a 486, but not a modern WM...

oops, yeah, whatever distro you use, make sure you get the i386 or i486 version.
the i586 and i686 vrsions will not work.

madcrow, i dont know what you are basig that on, but fedora core 3 (a very recent linux distro) is still i386 compatable.

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

make sure any packages you use end in -i386 -i686 will not work.

Thank you all for your help. I have done many linux installs, it's just been about 5 years ago, so I'm just a little out of date. Thank you all for your recomendations. I really appreciate all the help.