Hooray – I have got a proper sign on the door now!

Thanks to bOOgie, pixel-pusher extraordinaire and all-round generous mate to those in need!

No further news, life got in the way these last few days…

Agnula was an effort funded by the European Commission, who had a fantastically lucid moment when deciding to fund research into bringing open source software “to the critical masses”, and in particular to the audio profession. Funding ended in 2004 though.
Agnula released two distributions, one was based on Debian, one on RedHat. I only ever played with the Debian distribution, as most of my wonderful friends and acquaintances use Debian and some aspects of the OS can vary wildly between distributions. It’s good to have someone to call on for help when trying on a new OS! Anyway, lets see whether I can continue from where I left off during my last attempt?
So I took a wander down to the Agnula website to see what pointers I may find to guide me. First of all they tell me that the project is on ice. The page was last modified in April this year, so maybe the latest release is still warm enough to be a starting point for me? The release notes are not date-stamped, but once I drill down into the download directories I find that the last stable release is from April 2005. Ok, so that’s a corpse, well and truly decomposed.

Can the homepage lend a hand then to move on from here?
A couple of links are dead, even though the page has been updated quite recently. Apparently the development effort has moved over to DebianMultimedia. Now this is clearly a development environment and not a shop front for dummies like me, so there are no biscuits or road signs. I spend about 20 minutes trying to figure out whether these developers actually release anything to the end-user, but it does not look like it. But it’s got a link page, and there I finally find hope in the form of four links:

Musix – which loads in Spanish first, which I like a lot. As long as it’s easy enough to see where to change languages, I am all in favour of multi-language sites not defaulting to English!

Ubuntu Studio – Ubuntu in my mind standing for “the people who made Debian user-friendly”, and someone there has been looking into a studio setup – shall my hunt be over before it even got under way? We’ll see…

64Studio – I heard about them but, as the name suggests, they were originally focusing on the emerging 64bit architecture only. Now they have 32bit compatible releases in store!

Studio to Go! – this is a simple but slick looking page with promises – and a price tag. I shall investigate… later.

I have downloaded the first three of those for now – two very nicely via BitTorrent, and one in very short time from a local mirror. They all come in at about 800MB, one of them would definitely fit on a CD, but to be on the safe side they all get a DVD each. It feels a bit of a waste, but I am trying to do things as simple and straightforward as possible, and I have got a DVD writer and lots of blanks lying around…

Before I go and install any of them I want to do a bit more research though, to know what to expect, and who to call for help. I reckon it is also time to reflect on distributions, kernels etc. in general.

limu

I have not found the tea making facilities yet, but I have shifted my explanation of this blog over to the Why another blog? tab to keep this place tidy. Or rather tidy like, as the Welsh say!

So…

This is my first blog, and I have just moved in. Many of my good friends have blogs, many of them with WordPress. Who knows, one day I might even link to them :0)
Looks clean and shiny around here. Please excuse me for not getting you a drink, I will have to find my way around here first. I better go and find a piece of carton to write a sign for the door!

limu