Long live my humble Hammer rugged dumb phone…! Massively improved my quality of life when I ditched the smartphone in favour of this beauty, with its 2 MP camera and headphone jack sockets and battery that goes 2 weeks between charges, etc.
And by ditched the smartphone, I mean “relegated the thing to sitting on my work desk for MFA stuff and in my car as a sat nav”
Anyway, on topic - I think a Debian-based distro is probably the best choice for audio stuff but only because a lot of things are tested on Debian and even made available as .deb files. That’s why I recently moved back to LMDE from Void. Otherwise, any other distro will often work just as well and it’s often a fun endeavour setting them up.
Ah yes, widespeed availability of .deb packages made me stick to Debian also, combined with many recommendations coming from friends who know linux world better than i do.
Like I said, you speak my heart. I highly recommend “Your Computer Is On Fire” by Mar Hicks et al, published by The MIT Press 2021, as a read in this context.
Yeah Baby, that’s the spirit! I have to say though that the 20 year-old batteries (one spare) of my Sony Ericsson have achieved the ultimate feat if they last 2 days between charges just sitting there waiting for a call…
It’s good to see that, on the whole, there’s a consensus here about Debian; for a change, it seems I’ve actually made a proper life decision…
I had an assumption, but wanted to test it.
So, for the love of god and in the interest of science i gave it a try.
I install trisquel on an old lenovo thinkpad T400 ( 3 Gigs of Ram) and then installed some programs i usually use (though KX repos seem down right now, so all i could install is what is in the trisquel repos) :
ardour, setBfree, yoshimi, zynaddsubfx, amsynth, x-42 and lsp plugins, dragonfly-reverb, i think that was it mainly. I didn’t bother downloading lv2’s from the web.
Pipewire gave me hard times, so i removed it and installed qjackctl/jack instead.
After that all installed programs worked and had sound ( all but yoshimi, i didn’t look any further why not, it did work in ardour though).
I then tested:
a) M-Audio M-Track Solo Soundcard
b) Behringer C-1 mic
c) a quite basic midistart music 25 ; midi-keyboard
d) an even more basic korg nanoKey2 midi-keyboard (rather a toy).
Everything worked right away. I didn’t bother anymore to also test the Yamaha P-45 E-piano, i already had to plug quite some cables back-and-forth, but i see no reasons why it shouldn’t work also.
Wireless didn’t work, of course, but i don’t use wireless anyway.
So, for a first test, it was good or even very good. For someone like me who only does some fun and rather basic projects, easy midi-sequencing, with the hardware i have, it sure would do it, and do it just as well as any other distro. Doing professional or more serious things, i simply can’t say how far it would go. Also, of course, some problems occur only in the long run, the proof is in the pudding, they say.
I’d say for someone who is really interested in running a libre distro, it is sure worth a try.
If you want me to test something, i would do it, if i am able to, but i guess in a bit i will replace it with a different installation (it all is a bit heavy for this quite old and low-spec machine).
Cool, that’s good to know.
Seems like all basic necessities worked, and class compliant usb interfaces too.
So problably an Lenovo T480 will be quite cool with that kind of distro installed.
I’m interested in how far something completely libre could get as a platform for creative work,
so, this is great info, i appreciate it dearly. Thanks.
Haha, I installed Deb 11 on a 2005 IBM ThinkPad T42, and removed one application after another which proved to be too much for the poor thing, such as Firefox, Gimp, Ardour, am I missing something? Certainly.
What’s left is Evolution (which works swiftly), Synaptic, Network Manager, Text Editor, Calculator, XSkat (vital), the Solitaire collection, and Image Viewer.
I a former experiment I did it the other way around, installed the basic system and added XServer, Synaptic, Network Manager, Evolution, Solitaire, and XSkat.
By the time I’ll have to switch to DEB 11… aw snap, forgot: I believe there is no longer a 32Bit version… Well, It’s going to be something else then.
I tried Trisquel on that prehistoric machine btw but it didn’t work. Something came up during installation, a requirement the T42 didn’t meet, I don’t remember which.
In my experience antix does a really good job on low-end machines, but still gives you enough comfort (compared with distros like tiny core linux or slitaz or such). It might even be they still have a 32bit version, not sure (i chekced, they have).
I usually get pretty close to how little ressources antix uses, but never that low (something like 130 MB Ram usage after boot). The obvious trick which does most is to not use a DesktopEnvironment, then a lightweight terminal-emulator, then disable whatever seems to suit no purpose, unattended-upgrades and what not (for me much easier with say sysv-init-system), i use ps_mem.py for that.
Ardour works (kinda) on low-end machines like that, as long i don’t stretch it (same for VCVRack). If both don’t, i use something like seq24 (not in the repos anymore … grml …). I even tried alsa-modular-synth, but it was too difficult for me
The big problem obviously is the web-browser. So as long i am willing to give up on that, it kinda works for me (to have some fun, for serious stuff … probably won’t work well).
Long story short, antix might be worth a try, perhaps you tried already.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll try that and report back when the time comes. Not so far away, support end this summer. I suppose you can’t use the Debian repositories? Well, that would be a new experience, why not.
Haha, I tried it of course on the T42 with Debian 11, and one guitar track plus simple drums (a WAV generated with Hydrogen) worked, but when I wanted to record a second guitar track it went hasta la vista, Baby!
Yes, the web-browser. I can live without one on that installation, glad Evolution works. I had a text-based Wikipedia installed which worked very well.
It’s really a pity there will be no more 32Bit version, for wat you describe
Well, last thing i tried doing with that original M52 pentium D processor+motherboard was running AntiX with it. RAM was a bottleneck cause at that point it only had 512MB , and running just freshly installed os+de took around 300-350MB. It worked, but you couldn’t do much with it, and i wasn’t even trying cause it was all running from and old, half-dead mechanical drive. That was around 7-8 years ago, if my memory serves me correctly. It served as a music player and a single channel recorder in our rehersal space for a while, until motherboard capacitors went bust, and that was the end of it.
Hmmm. I do have a Methusalem with a 75 Mhz Pentium CPU sitting in the corner which I always wanted to try with a slim Linux Distro. I’ll have to look up the RAM, and if it’s as much as 130 MB I’ll try it with Antix…
Well… if you don’t want to use systemd for some reason (me, for example), you could look into distributions that use Open-RC, dinit, SysV (used by Slackware and Devuan), runit or S6.
I currently use Artix (Arch without systemd) right now, and with a little bit of work with WINE, I can get the Windows plugins I use to work properly. Other distributions you could look into are things like Devuan (Deban AU of if SysV wasn’t removed), Vendefoul Wolf (Debian with OpenRC), any Adenix distribution, or Void. There are other distributions saying no to new age verification requirements (because that’s government-coerced speech), even if they have systemd (Garuda, CachyOS, and EndeavourOS being three examples), and I’d highly take a look at any more you might have on hand.
What i meant is that i will get as low as that, usually i use something debian-based. antix would be slightly lower than 130. Not sure if the now based-on-antix “damn-small-linux” is still there, they booted to ~70-80 MB. With “normal” (even old and low-spec, say 20 years + ) hardware, you won’t see much of a difference between all of them, they’ll be pretty snappy compared with a DesktopEnvironment and all the “comfort” they come with.
If your device is really that low-spec, then you probably don’t want any GUI at all, not even a WM. Tiny Core Linux sure is worth a try, it is amazingly snappy (been quite some years i tested it on shitty hardware, mainly cause some “idiots” broke into my apartment and stole all the crap hardware and left all the rest … ) slitaz and puppy i don’t know much more than the name, but both are worth a try.
Usually a problem is electricity consumption with that old hardware. They might run, they might be fun, but it is quite expensive if doing it regularly. In a few months you easily have spend the money you could just as well spend on a new device …
all, obviously, as far i can tell. I only fool around with things, it’s really just "try it and see " or “how far will i get” approach.
Also we really offtopic now, i doubt we still talk anything audio. No clue how to send private messages on discourse, else i would have done that.
It bugs me quite a bit at the top of this thread there is “popular links”, but neither AV Linux nor Ubuntustudio are listed. Let me try to trick discourse into adding those links to the default-standard solutions.
I do agree about the offtopping. You’re cordially invited to visit The Stepford Crash Pilots on bandcamp and contact me there, I just learned that you’re not required to have an account to send a message.
Thanks for re-igniting my interest in Debian with this post…
I’d disregarded it a few years ago for reasons I don’t recall (installation difficulties perhaps)…
Came back to it yesterday (13.4 with GNOME in a very modest ASUS E410M) and I’m very happily setting up a portable DAW with no impediments to report so far…
Quite a bit more expedite than XFCE Mint too…
Nice going!
Thanks…
A while ago, they switched to including nonfree firmware in the installation disk (which they used to omit). This made it way easier to install in the (extremely common) case that you need non-FLOSS drivers (mainly: wireless card drivers). For example, the Intel wifi drivers (package firmware-iwlwifi) is in the section non-free-firmware/kernel, so it would not have been included earlier.
I was glad when they did this because it made setting up a new Debian install way easier than it used to be.
