Ubuntu, one of the many open source alternatives to Microsoft’s Windows operating system has been getting a lot of positive publicity recently with the news that Dell are to offer it on some of their computer hardware. I use it for most of my computer reuse work and it seems to be accepted quite well by computer users. One of the many available customisations is Ubuntu Studio which is a variation based around many specialised open source audio visual software offerings including multi track audio recording, synthesizers ,audio samplers, video editing and midi sequencing.
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Ubuntu Studio « Stuffem-Up the hill backwards
Woo.. now that’s a distribution that appeals to me – my studio PCs have been Windows-based for I don’t know how long, so depending on what Ubuntu Studio offers (the website link, despite being the top offering on Google, doesn’t even go ‘nowhere’ at the moment.. http://ubustu.com seems to work, though) I might be tempted to move across.
Oh.. except that I’ve got an 8-in, 8-out soundcard (http://www.gadgetlabs.org/) that there aren’t any Linux drivers for. Ah well. Something for the laptop, perhaps?…
j
Hi James- admittedly all the software offered here is available to any of the Ubuntu variations (in the standard Ubuntu repositories) and could be installed quite easily but they’ve decided to create a very specialised version with AV software and themed it specifically to appeal to audio and video editing creative’s. I presume that like most of the Ubuntu offerings it’ll load as a live CD in order to have a quick “look-see” and then allow hard drive partitioning, resize and install. No doubt it’ll be virtualization friendly via VMWare or parallels etc.
I have no idea if your soundcard would work via Ubuntu’s ndiswrapper which let’s you use Windows specific drivers.I would imagine that this offering is largely for people who haven’t already invested too much in existing hardware and OS platforms. It’s always good to have the choice though.