oggei,
What a great idea, especially for Lenny, Sid is pretty volatile for audio stuff unless you are a hardcore Debian user and know what you’re doing.
One issue that is really a problem for ArdourVST now is current WINE versions, It used to be that if WINE caused double windows (ie the plugin wrapper window with “bypass/active” and the actual plugin GUI were displayed separately) that changing the “allow window manager to control windows” in Wine config would fix it, however since about WINE 0.9.52 this cannot be fixed by any method I know.
I have set up ArdourVST in two separate Ubuntu Hardy installations with WINE 1.0 and haven’t been able to fix this problem. I’ve tried building older versions of Wine from source but they seem unstable and don’t integrate into the system as nicely as the binaries do. Also Ubuntu Gutsy Wine binaries which work properly are not installable in Hardy and I’m sure Intrepid will be no better.
If during a session you close either the separate plugin GUI Window or the “wrapper” it will not re-appear unless you quit and re-open the session. This is an extra PITA and ArdourVST doesn’t need any more inconveniences than it already has!
About a week ago I tried Sidux, they have a Community RT Kernel that is not even functional with JACK right now. I wanted to try Lenny but didn’t know that an RT kernel was available until I read your post.
Would you be willing or interested in building a custom version of Wine for your repo? Or perhaps Wine 0.9.49 - 0.9.52 for Debian Etch would work. I would be willing to test this, and also contribute a list of VST plugins known to work well within ArdourVST if that would be helpful.
For now I have gone back to Ubuntu Gutsy because I can build a really stable ArdourVST in it with my eyes closed. However Ubuntu will be dropping support for it very soon, and I haven’t liked what I see with Hardy as an audio distro so far. I am really interested in trying your Lenny setup out though… thanks for all your efforts in this and sharing it on the forum.
I will tell you that the Ardour devs for all their hard work and patience with “we the users”, generally regard ArdourVST as a bastard stepchild that lives in an attic!
#ardour on IRC gets pretty quiet when you bring up ArdourVST (LOL)
EDIT
I checked out your repos, great work, I was wondering if the Debian Realtime page could have an English version like the Ardour page as well.
Thanks again!