Linux audio (mostly) geekery

[mdlbear]

If you're interested in sound recording and/or Linux, and aren't also reading filk, you might want to take a look at this post where I describe the AGNULA Project's recently-released DeMuDi 1.1.1 Live, a full music-recording, editing and playback suite all on a bootable CD-ROM. Put it in your CD drive, reboot your PC, and start recording.

unrelated Linux geekery

Among other recent activity at work, I've been trying for a couple of days to get Linux installed on a Dell desktop machine. Unfortunately, the only way we could get a 120GB drive on that particular (cheap) model was SATA (Serial ATA), which is new enough that most older Linux distributions (including RedHat 9) don't support it.

Knoppix does, however. I recommend using the next-to-last version, which uses a recent 2.4 kernel. The latest uses 2.6, and seemed a bit unstable to me. Note, too, that distros that do support SATA seem to differ about whether the drive should be called hda or hde, which doesn't help when you're trying to rescue a botched LILO install.

[edit] The current version of RedHat Enterprise Linux supports SATA drives -- it's what Dell ships with them. Try WhiteBox, a free distro derived from RHEL. Another thing to watch out for is the ethernet controller, an Intel e1000.

Comments

[ravan.livejournal.com]

WhiteBox works well on Dell. The distro has support for the Intel e1000 in it, IIRC.

[mdlbear]

I may end up resorting to WhiteBox, though at the moment Debian (installed via Knoppix) seems to be working well, and I've gotten addicted to apt-get as a package manager.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

SuSE also works with SATA (I have good reason to know); and you can run apt-get with it, with a small bit of work. sgailean has even managed to get it working on x86-64.