-> Jimmy: "As you were there in the beginning, what was the thinking around the questions we have been discussing in this thread then? Why was it based on Ubuntu? What was the vision? How did it become an official Ubuntu distribution? Why didn't you chose to do it by ourselves like ABC Studio or similar? I think that maybe looking back on the vision from the start can givs us some feedback on why och where to go?"
Let's go for the long version. This is my version, based on my point of view and experience of the project. I hope I will not make mistakes: *it was 10 years ago ;-) *Tell me if I am wrong. At the very beginning: - There was people trying to install Planet CCRMA on Fedora, but Fedora was too "open source minded" at that time to have non free codecs. And the .rpm system was missing something to help managing dependencies, like Debian apt-get/dpkg/synaptic/aptitude are doing. - There was also some stuff around Debian, Arch, Gentoo, Mandrake/Mandriva (I remembered trying to build a stage 1 and stopping my machine after 2 days of building for just the core...) but all were great for servers, but a pain to install and configure for desktop - And then in 2004/2005 came Ubuntu, easy to install, easy for desktop use, with up to date packages, and more. That was an instant success, so many not technical GNU/Linux enthusiasts like me were waiting for something like that, just for day to day use ! At this time, I was moderator on Framasoft.net, the most important french organisation to promote open source software. Using only free softwares (Open Office, Firefox, ...) I was already able produce graphic and content with free software. However, I was stuck on Windows because of the lack of an easy to use GNU/Linux distro. With Ubuntu, I did the switch. And that is how I started to spend time on making things working for audio and video. I don't really know the motivations of the other. However, it was still difficult to record audio: - Audacity was available on Ubuntu - Ardour was not working well because of the lack of a port of the RT kernel from Red Hat kernel to Debian kernel - alsa-firmware was not available in Ubuntu, and more, there were issues with the package, so the sound card firmware were not loadable In order to produce Video: - firewire was buggy - the support varied between kernel version, AND Ubuntu version - drivers for graphic cards were complicated to get, but available, thanks to the CAD industry - but most of softwares were already available >From the very beginning, we were a few multimedia enthusiasts in the Ubuntu community, 4 or 5 not more. Some were coming from Debian. And we had this idea in mind: "*It must be possible to produce multimedia with GNU/Linux*". Ubuntu was for us an evidence... It worked on PC and Mac, was already stable, light, anybody can use it and install software. So we started to work on that, from USA, Canada, and France. First step was to get a working RT kernel for Ubuntu. With the help of a young french kernel hacker, we used a patched vanilla kernel that we hosted on a manually generated repository (Alessio's kernel came after, and PPA didn't exist). I was the only one owning high end sound cards. And when I tried to use them, I discover the need to fix alsa-firmware. Again, everybody was stuck on Windows to use good hardware :-( Not being a dev myself, I spent a lot of time contacting devs and package mainteners on IRC, email, forums, trackers, ... pointing issues and asking for their help. I talked to Paul Davis, to Steinberg representatives to understand if it could be possible to have VST running without Wine, tried to convince Qsampler devs to go full open source so we could distribute it, worked with alsa devs to fix the alsa-firmware package, filed so many bugs, reported them upstream when needed, ... The Canadian Debian dev helped me a lot on the technical side, he was the first package maintainer for multimedia packages in Ubuntu Universe, and with him we wrote the doc ever about producing multimedia with Ubuntu. He quit because at some point, because he disagreed with Mark Shuttleworth vision about open source, future of GNU/LInux, etc We lost a very active contributor. At this time, you could find those resources : - ubuntu.ttoine.net (me) with a list of packages to install, and a repo for the vanilla rt kernel and alsa-firmware - ubuntu studio, a wiki in Canada, - some private chat on IRC - threads on Ubuntu forums. - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudioPreparation But nothing well organised. When Kubuntu was officialy recognised by Canonical, came the idea to have a derivative. It was in 2006. The first name idea was Mubuntu, for Multimedia Ubuntu. But there was already a Micro-Ubuntu project, so the M was not available. We asked the Canadian developer if we could use Ubuntu Studio. Then we created a wiki section and a project on Launchpad. It became reknown quickly and we have been invited to 2006 UDS at Google Headquarter so we can meet, but also meet Canonical managers to set legal stuff, etc. Funny, the first Pulse Audio packages for Ubuntu were built on my laptop by Lennart Pottering at this event... At that time, Cory took the lead, and it turns out that we were not on the same spirit at all: - I was focused on making things working, like I did from the start - He was focused on having a beautiful look'n feel for the desktop and other low priority stuff in my opinion So I stopped being active. I just continued to maintain some base documentation, testing and report bugs. I also negotiated with Medibuntu to host alsa-firmware and other restricted packages (e.g: codecs). When Cory left Ubuntu Studio, a new team started and did a very good job. I think most of you know the story from there: you are this amazing team. Antoine THOMAS Tél: 0663137906 2015-09-03 12:59 GMT+02:00 Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net>: > > >On Thu, 3 Sep 2015 11:30:04 +0200, ttoine wrote: > >>Actually we could host on our own if we wish. > > Antoine, please try to do proper quoting in the future. > > I now noticed this was written by Len and it's not related to the mixer. > > In your reply it isn't marked as a quote. > > -- > ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list > ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel >
-- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
