MIDIbox Linux Distro

MIDIbox Documentation Project
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Hey boxers,

The idea of a linux distro for midibox use is not mine, and not new… It’s been knocking around for quite some time. The idea is, that you can download an ISO image, burn it to a CD/DVD, reboot, and you have a perfectly working system, all preconfigured for things like:

Editing ASM and C source files

Compiling/assembling apps

MIOS Studio and similar tools for uploading and testing

Schematic/PCB layout design

Panel design

PIC simulation

Web browser with handy bookmarks

Audio/Video recording to share your goodies

Maybe some music apps so you can use it as a studio

etc etc etc etc

I personally think it’s a fantastic idea, so, every so often I try out a bunch of linux distros to see if any are up to the job of being a “just works” (for everyone) solution. Needless to say, linux is not well known for being a “just works” kind of thing :smiley:

I’ve recently tried out ubuntu hardy heron, and, much to my delight, it’s worked, out of the box, on every system I’ve thrown it at, from clone desktops to HP desktops to enterprise servers (that was fast!) to crappy old Celeron II to a couple of laptops (both HP and full of proprietry stuff as usual). Wicked. There’s a nice pretty GUI for everything you need to mess with too, and ubuntu is well geared for making customised distros and live cds, which can also be installed or make “persistent”, meaning they save all your settings, apps, etc for next time. It’ll happily coexist with XP and NTFS filesystems, and I expect the same for macs.

So now I’m curious… How many people are really interested in this?

What are the chances of linux being your primary OS? Or would this be something you’d use as a secondary option?

Should this be more strictly midibox focussed, or is it worth broadening the scope for other goodies (won’t be hard) like AVR, arduino, Synth-DIY, etc (could be a general DIY audio/electronics distro)

What features or apps would be a “must have” for you?

What would you really like to see?

What would be a dealbreaker?

Are you an ubuntu hater? Did it not “just work” for you? Do you have any other suggestions? (remember , “just works” is a must)

Can you help if we do this thing?

Any thoughts at all are welcome on this. This is just a brain-dumping session to test the waters.

Edit: Wiki pages is here: http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/labuntu:labuntu That name is just a working name :wink:

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IMO a good place to start would be a distro that is not fully featured but simply does work. One that allows me to develop applications (development toolchain, mios studio), get on the net to do some research would do for a start. Once that works, I’d like some music making features added. An out-of-the-box linux that can be run from a USB stick would be just perfect :wink:

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IMO a good place to start would be a distro that is not fully featured but simply does work. One that allows me to develop applications (development toolchain, mios studio), get on the net to do some research would do for a start. Once that works, I’d like some music making features added. An out-of-the-box linux that can be run from a USB stick would be just perfect :wink:

That’s pretty much the plan :slight_smile:

The ubuntu live CD can be a live CD/DVD, which makes no changes to your system… or boot from CD/DVD/USB stick/USB drive and save settings to your HDD for next time, or you can put it on a USB stick entirely, or install to your HDD (overwriting windows, or dual booting), or uhm… i think that covers it… It’ll do all that cool stuff and it does it mostly GUI style, it’s tops.

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Where is the vote for a windows distro?

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Heheh I think that’s the first one :wink:

Had I not come across a decent linux distro in this pass, I would have gone that way, but as it happened…

I’m still compiling a list of windows apps that I use though, to post in another thread.

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Where is the vote for a windows distro?

afaik it s illegal, you are not allowed to make a windows distro

Stryd it s great news!!! Of course you can count with me if this stuff will get started, i would start with MIDIBox stuff then let the other community join the idea, and add their packages.

If we are going to add some music stuff then it is worth to use the UbuntuStudio distro that come with the Real Time kernel already compiled in

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Ubuntustudio deal is this: (simpsons joke ensues)

There’s no liveCD. That’s Bad

All the packages can be installed from normal ubuntu, even the live distro, anyway - making ubuntu into ubuntustudio. That’s Good

The packages are all really old (“stable”) versions. That’s Bad

The linux-rt package (realtime kernel) is up to date. That’s Good

But I’ll have to package up or at least compile the newer versions of the audio software. That’s Bad

But I’m going to do all that for myself anayway, so I don’t mind doing it for the community to use also. That’s Good

The frogurt is cursed. That’s Bad.

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All the packages can be installed from normal ubuntu, even the live distro, anyway - making ubuntu into ubuntustudio. That’s Good

this is unfortunately untrue, there is a thread on the UbuntuStudio mailing list about this “issue”, it s not  a real issue though, anyway, we don t realy want  a cutting edge distro, we should aim at the MIDIBox tools for the moment right?

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Well this will be my primary workstation, so yes, i want the cutting edge goodstuff in the audio realm, but i don’t want to do it from the ubustu packages cuz theyre too old anyway.

But yeh, development is the initial focus, as well as general usage apps that are standard … yaknow, openoffice, firefox, media viewers (pdf, video, audio, flash) etc… You need all that stuff around here. The basics, and the midibox stuff, are #1.

I’ve got my eye on piklab, check it out! IDE for ASM and C, and burns your PIC too.

You guys seen ucsim?

Anyone recommend a good programmer’s text editor? It needs to do tabs, filesystem tree in a sidebar, search/replace, find in files, marking, highlighting, diff, run commands (make) and jump to code when you click on an error from the output… I’m thinking about notepad++ here… Not an IDE, needs to be useful for other text files too (logs, config files, etc)

Edit: Heh…“MIDIbuntu”

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Well this will be my primary workstation, so yes, i want the cutting edge goodstuff in the audio realm

dunno, preparing a cutting edge audio linux distro … you see the guys at UbuntuStudio .. CCRMA is a rock solid community (university) with years of experience..

so my opinion is, we deliver an “intro” audio linux distro where the audio is just secondary but enough to give the user the chance to try something out, then and if he ll like he can choose his own audio distro (read: CCRMA, sorry Cory)

or

then we talk FC8/9 with CCRMA and our MIDIBox packages, that s an option, why don t we ask Fernando if he would like to add a MIDIBox package to the list? that sounds reasonable.. we mantain of course..

Simone

EDIT: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo

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Anyone recommend a good programmer’s text editor?

I tried scite briefly when I was playing around with Ruby about a year ago. All the features you need don’t come with the original program, but there are developers out there adding features all the time (like a file explorer). Worth a look, at least.

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Thanks frailn… Tried scite already though, it didn’t seem to have many of the features we need :frowning: You know any others?

cimo: confession: I didn’t try f9 yet, because I had tried f8 recently and it lacked ‘just works’ factor … I grabbed the f9 iso last night, I’ll try it today. As you know, I have always settled on fedora+ccrma in the past, so I’m all for it… but it does need to be user-friendly. If f9 doesn’t work out that way, I guess what we’re building would be an ubuntu (and maybe debian) repo that is similar to ccrma, but with development tools also, and just our selection of audio apps.

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Anyone recommend a good programmer’s text editor?

EMACS!  :slight_smile:

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If such a distro could also do the most rudimentary of audio playback/streaming app, then it would quickly become my “workshop” platform of choice.

I can’t get much work done if I ain’ts rockin’ outs.

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afaik it s illegal, you are not allowed to make a windows distro

Well i mean a unattended distro with all packages built in then. You still have to use your own serial and the windows sources etc.

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EMACS! :slight_smile:

Hmmm, powerful and fits most of the above requirements, but there are no tabs, and that’s part of a general lack of user-friendliness… Any thoughts?

FWIW, emacs and vi would probably be part of the distro no matter what, but I don’t see them being the default… Too confusing for newbies, myself included. I like to click stuff, not search manuals to find key commands :wink:

Edit: note that in windows land I can just use the standardised key commands so that problem doesn’t exist.

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I did think about making a giant .msi file package so that anyone could usi a nice easy installer package, but I bailed on that idea because it would be tricky to do updates.

Now that I’m migrating away from windows (at last!) I don’t really want to invest that kind of time anyway, and APT makes it easy for me to update apps for linux, so…

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Stryd, I think I love you!

I used to use Linux a fair bit but for some reason I can’t remember I stopped.. prolly something to do with Redhat and un-supported hardware. I’d like to get back using it and would be a good excuse to start learning again alongside all the othe rmidibox things I need to learn. I like the idea of a USB stick/Live CD as it means you can take it anywhere and use it on anybodies PC without having to install things to their drive.

So now I’m curious… How many people are really interested in this?  Me for sure.

What are the chances of linux being your primary OS? Or would this be something you’d use as a secondary option?  This would be a secondry option for midiboxing/electronics/maybe music production in gerneral. I still need doze, but it would be really good to have anice clean, stable Linux distro to boot in for music stuff

Should this be more strictly midibox focussed, or is it worth broadening the scope for other goodies (won’t be hard) like AVR, arduino, Synth-DIY, etc (could be a general DIY audio/electronics distro)  See above!

What features or apps would be a “must have” for you? Don’t know enough to say

What would you really like to see?  Some nice music apps

What would be a dealbreaker? Umnn.. lost of nice midibox customisation!

Are you an ubuntu hater? Did it not “just work” for you? Do you have any other suggestions? (remember , “just works” is a must) Have no problems with it. Personally my preference is redhat/mandrake, although I quite like the look of SUSE.

Can you help if we do this thing? Not really, I don’t have enough experience of Linus/coding midibox, but if there’s anything I can do let me know, whether it be Monkey testing it or whatever.

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You can fight 1980s Olivia for me :wink:

I’m burning fedora9 to test it right now… We’ll see how it fares in comparison. It seems that a lot of us are fedora (+ccrma) users.

I strongly considered SUSE, it had a big edge over the other distros for me, because I have access to some very intensive tech support for it which normally costs a lot of money. Unfortunately it wasn’t so portable as ubuntu, it only liked certain machines… Bummer!

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I’m definitely interested in a linux distro. In addition to the features listed by Stryd, I’m sure people would want a DAW. I don’t know if there are Linux versions of the popular commerical DAW’s…but there is Ardour (which I’ve never tried) and Rosegarden (which I’ve briefly tried, but haven’t given a good run). Both can handle MIDI if I remember correctly.

There is a good article about using Linux for recording and mastering.

Not suggesting that these be a part of the distro - just optional programs for those that want to use MIDI sequencing software (Rosegarden) or a DAW (Ardour) with the distro.