Hi HC and the gang,
I just gave a PD workshop at Denver University. There were three or four Windows users, almost a dozen Mac users with various versions of OSX 10.3 or 10.4 and one Debian user. Only one had any previous experience either installing or using PD. This was a pretty typical workshop group in my experience in terms of both platform and experience levels, although I would assume that out in PD-UserLand you would find Linux users much better represented demographically.
As an experiment, I had everyone use the extended installers to see if it would save us some time. In the past, installation has often taken up a full day or more depending on architecture and whether or not PDP is being covered.
Some feedback:
- Windows
- Pd-0.38.4-extended-RC8.exe installer
- Installation seemed fine.
- Gem and many other windows-supported externals seemed OK
- [joystick] refused to load
- [playlist] refused to load
- Not enough time to test all externals
- This installer probably saved a lot of time over the MSP installer
because of the included externals. I'll continue to recommend it for windows users.
- OSX
- Pd-0.38.4-extended-RC8.dmg
- PDP copied from Pd-0.38.4-extended-RC5.dmg (I made the install CD for
the workshop before HC updated the RC8 installer).
- As I've reported several times before, the GUI ranges from slow to
unresponsive. The -nrt flag does seem to help fix this problem, although I'm not sure if that means more audio glitches or not. The only other workaround seems to be to reduce patch complexity and the number/update times of GUI elements.
- [hid] broke down frequently for several workshop participants,
particularly when opening the help patch. It has worked flawlessly with the 0.38.4-extended-RC8 for me under 10.4.4-10.4.5, so I cannot explain why it instantly crashed for others. We tried it primarily with Logitech and Sidewinder joysticks.
- PDP did not get the testing it needed because most participants
neglected to install X11.
- I'd like to be able to factor "user error" into some of this (with
[hid], for example), but we really all went through the same install together, including copying over the proper plist file. So I really don't know. Maybe different OSX versions? I won't be seeing most of these students again, so I won't have time to individually troubleshoot and make bug reports for each situation. Sorry...
- As a side-note: in contrast to what Sara Kolster and I reported
earlier, her old 0.37 installer was slow/unresponsive when audio processing is turned on, and sound breaks up even in a patch with only three objects, one GUI element and a MIDI input. Sara uses 0.37 for Gem only, which works fine with the 0.37 installer but is unresponsive with the 0.38 ones.
- I still find the terrible response-times of the GUI the biggest
problem to work with under OSX, with the unpredictability of [hid] coming in a distant second.
- In general, however, using these installers saved me a tremendous
amount of time on OSX. Thanks!
- I don't think that time would be saved if OSX workshoppers had to get
PD+friends from Fink or Darwin-Ports (I recall long ago having to get people to install Fink just for PDP/PiDiP!), but if a non-Aqua interface would speed up the PD GUI under OSX I'd support further investigation into that. Perhaps a DMG installer based on such a Fink/Darwin-Ports compile would follow on the heels of committing PD to one of these package manager systems?
- Debian/Linux
- Pd-0.38.4-extended-RC8-linux-i686.tar.bz2
- This participant had problems with the Debian and DeMuDi packages for
Gem, and Jack support was also missing, so we used HC's installer.
- Most externals tested seemed OK.
- I can't recall if JACK support worked, I'll check back on Monday. It
would be good to make sure it's compiled with both Jack and ALSA-MIDI support.
- Gem did not work--the library refused to load. Using "locate", we
could not find a Gem.pd_linux or gem.pd_linux anywhere on her laptop. Only gem_counter.pd_linux appeared in a search for "gem". Has it actually been included?
- PDP seemed OK, more details soon.
- I'll be testing her laptop again on Monday, so more specifics will be
available then.
- Once Gem works, and if Jack/ALSA-MIDI is there (apologies if I missed
it!), this installer will also save a ton of time during workshops.
- Can anybody suggest an x86 Linux liveCD with a full PD installation
that actually works? By this I mean fast OpenGL/3D/Accelerated Graphics drivers, Jack, ALSA-MIDI and externals without broken dependencies (all problems I've encountered with live CDs + PD before). I'm guessing the Apodio one might be the ticket, but I'm still open to suggestions. Isn't Apodio only in French?
I hope this is feedback you can use. Again apologies for less-than-specifics at times, but with 15 people in a two hour session there's just not much time for it. All in all, thanks for keeping these going HC!
best, derek