Hi all of you, First, let me quickly present myself: I'm Aurélien Roux, member of the french Free and Freak Arts Cooperative "AMMD", in which I work as a multitask guy: musician (in several project implying free softwares), sound guy (we own a studio with a Debian-based workstation), teacher for the "use of GNU/Linux for musical creation, live-diffusion and production", as well as for stage lights management, and sys-admin/dev (we have developped several pieces of free software - mostly crappy - in the contexts of the artistical projects we care about, and we also patched several others for the same purposes).
I'm thinking for several years about "building a real-debian-based distribution for audio creation and production, stage technics and video" that would fit my needs, and that I could advice to my students, friends, ... I've been testing several others distributions like UbuntuStudio, 64Studio (when it existed), kxstudio, AVLinux, but all of them presented some problems I finally had to solve by myself, and I finally always switched back to Debian and customized my system the way I need. There is an exception, though, called TangoStudio, a distribution created several years ago, based on Ubuntu, and which was really a good distribution, which I could advice to my students as it was both functionnal, stable, free (DFSG) and easy to use/install (whereas Debian official cannot be adviced for audio pruposes to someone beginning). TangoStudio's main dev has stopped to work on it in April, and by that time a discussion occured which resulted in the idea of keeping it alive, but to work on a 2.0 version, based on Debian. We're several people who want to imply ourselves in it, with different profiles, but let's say I'm probably the most informatic of them. I've been searching for some days the solutions we might chose to build such a distribution, and after spending time on simple-cdd, live-build, or again remastersys, Charles Plessy finally told me to check Debian Pure Blends, and I must admit what I'm talking about is clearly a blend. After looking a bit, it seems to fit perfectly an existing blend, which is the Debian-Multimedia one, and from the discussion I had with some of you on IRC this morning, I think I'm not wrong. So, here it is, I'd be interesting in knowing whether that project could enter that blend, and myself at the same occasion. It's a true question for me as I'm just discovering that blend stuff, and I don't want to do some mess in something already working, or whatever. There are also some people wanting to involve (semi-dev like me, or bêta-testers, or again people with communication/web skills, the ones who were involved in TangoStudio). From the discussions on IRC this morning, it seems that blends shouldn't be restricted to dev only, but could also be opened to "specialised users", so they could join the blend too, but once again, I don't want to do too much mess. To end up, we're currently listing all the features that were in TangoStudio and that appear to us as "essentials" for that type of audio/lights/video specialised users. The list is not complete by now, but clearly, it has to deal with: - having realtime property, priorities, memlock, open file numbers and so on preconfigured, - avoiding pulseaudio by default - having several packages not in debian yet (Non quadrilogy, Tapeutape, Tranches, Q Light Controller...), and maybe having an experimental branch for bleeding-edge softwares to be tested ; also having several packages compiled with different options from Debian official (this might be discussed) - a (graphical) installer with more options/questions than it has by now (like what GUIs do you want: XFCE, LXDE, TouchScreen GUI, none, or again what softwares pack should be installed at installation time: audio production, audio for live, video, base-system, and so on), - a selection of preconfigured WM from the Light-Gnome that TangoStudio had, to a very light Openbox, without forgetting that touchscreen thing which is more and more used in live conditions (sound guys often can't make the difference between an OS and the WM they use) and first of all, this "blend" or "distribution" or "Debian Custom" should be packed as iso files, so that anyone might install it easily (as TangoStudio did). Well, here it is. It was long, sorry for the convenience, and congratulations if you read until there! Regards, -- Aurélien -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
