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View Full Version : Fresh system, fresh install (or feisty indeed)



mousejunkie
May 26th, 2007, 03:01 PM
I have an Acer ferrari 4005 laptop and had been waiting for a Linux distro geared towards musicians. I read up on the available distros and when Ubuntu Studio finally arrived and I installed it.

Having used Propellerheads' Reason for several years now, I have yet to find an alternative for it (under any OS). Those who say there is one cannot, imho, have ever really used Reason. I was hoping to get it to run under wine along with Counter Strike as these are probably the only two Windows based programs that I personally refuse to give up.

Reason is unfortunately not usable under wine. Counter Strike started via steam but the screen was black. Fortunately I was able to hear the menu so I could at least exit. This was before installing the ATI driver. After installing the ATI driver I am getting error messages that I can't even find via google. Reason however has improved in performance. :confused: Although a latency of 200ms is no good when using a midi keyboard. Using the mme driver insead of dx provides better performance as well... the opposite is the case under Windows. Maybe I can get the wineasio driver to work... haha - another major project!? When scrolling the Reason window, playback gets really skippy. Obviously it is a graphics related issue under wine. I'll give the CVS version of Cedega a go.

energyXT2 looks promising, but I have no clue as to what to do with the contents of the tar.gz file that I download (the linux demo version)

My laptop runs hot... even whilst just typing this under Ubuntu. Although I believe that this is something that can be fixed with a bit more reading. I had installed powernowd, but then could not shut down or restart anymore. I have removed it and my laptop runs hot again, but still refuses to shut down. (I had to use the option acpi=off in my menu.lst to get rid of the error message "timer not connect to io-apic" during boot - Don't know if this is related.)

Probably because of all the reading I have been doing recently, I have been dreaming (literally) of using Linux when I sleep. Unfortunately I have not been able to remember what I did, although I recall the dreams to be very vivid and in colour - Ubuntu desktop with my custom coloured background, terminal window and all... . :guitar:

I know that Linux is not made to run Windows programs so I'll be hanging on to XP Pro for a while.

As to Ubuntu Studio, it's probably leaving my laptop soon. I guess I'll get a Linux distro for AMD64 (Ubuntu or other) and go from there.

I am planning to get a new desktop system in the next few months and will probably purchase my hardware based upon linux hardware compatibility lists. (fresh system, fresh install)

I refuse to touch VISTA, even though it means a big change for me as I have been using MS OSs since DOS 5 running on a 286. But the user incapacitation from MS is really going too far.

I just needed to type all this to get rid of some frustration and figured the Community Cafe is probably the only place I can get away with it, without violating any rules.

Rant over... for now ):P

prizrak
May 26th, 2007, 04:03 PM
Damn, hope it works out for you. I think ATI might be your biggest problem with graphics. I'm surprised to hear that your laptop runs hot and has issues with restart/shutdown. I'm using an Acer TravelMate and it works well. Up till the latest nVidia drivers it even did Hibernate/Suspend :)

mousejunkie
May 26th, 2007, 07:45 PM
It's all gone now. Windows recovery -> fixmbr. Delete, format partitions.

I'm really not going to bother with Linux anymore until I've got a PC that's 100% hardware compatible with Linux.

Ireclan
May 26th, 2007, 08:16 PM
Hopefully, though, once you have a PC that's Linux-compatible, you'll still try it on hardware with unconfirmed compatibility (if you have it or have the money to purchase it). The data that can be obtained with such testing is often invaluable to Linux developers.

mousejunkie
May 26th, 2007, 09:10 PM
Definately will... I miss the time when I had 3-4 PC's running just to try out things. I have been able to help lots of people with Windows that way and hope to be able to start doing the same with Linux soon. One thing my last attempt has thought me is a better understanding of "Linux community"... perhaps also because I'm older now. For me the whole thing is (apart from wanting to use it personally) to be able to help others to get Linux onto their machines.

But first I'll have to get Linux running smoothly on one machine and get to to level where I don't just "sort of know" what I'm doing. That way I will be able to log what I'm doing in a sensible way and also contibute to the developers... but you guys probably know that anyway.

Guess it time to buy something like "Linux for Dummies" ;) - google alone is not enough, besides I'm beginning to get iffy about google as well