Hello list
I have a laptop now (Pentium M 1.72 GHz) and there's a void partition waiting for a Linux install. I want to use it for real time audio processing (Pure Data) and a few other things that are not very important here (Ardour, Scilab, Firefox, etc). After a quick look at the usual Internet places, I'm quite confused about distribution choice.
As I have some good experience of Red Hat 9 (the Planet CCRMA version) on a desktop, I investigated Fedora but according to what I read it looks quite big, complicated and slow because it would like to resemble Windows or OS X. I don't need so a lot of things and I have always believed that simple things work better. Maybe I'm wrong ...
Conversely, I don't want to loose time on technical things because I need to focus on music, so building my own distribution (or starting from Gentoo) is not possible (though really interesting) because it would take about 3 months or so. And maybe I don't need so specific complex tweaking for only doing realtime audio.
Some Linux distributions like Ubuntu seem to be a compromise between big linux and scratch linux but last time I tried Ubuntu I couldn't get correct low latency audio on it, hence I re-installed RH9. Did these medium-size distributions improve recently ?
There are also some "multimedia" linux like Agnula that I don't know anything about.
So which distribution would you recommand ? I need something efficient, performant for audio (I have a hdsp sound card that will help a lot), generic, that doesn't need 1 year of tweaking before working. The RH9 Planet CCRMA version was good and it included APT (mandatory). But things have changed and we are nearly in 2006 ... what if I would like to do a new track tomorrow ? :)
Thanks for your information
Regards Julien Breval