I plan to buy a laptop to make electronic music. I wanted to buy a G3 laptop and install linux on it (LinuxPPC).
Is there anyone that has still make pd run under maclinux and is there any problems? And generally, what is the best choice to make music with laptop (powerPC or Pentium?) and for the powerpc (mklinux or linuxPPC)?
Thank you for your answers.
CLD
Claude,
Well, I just looked into this and ended up buying an IBM Thinkpad (with the NeoMagic MagicMedia video/sound card chipset that is supposed to be well supported under linux now). I chose this over a powerbook because of * Price - this machine cost $800 less than the 333 G3 powerbook and is comparable * Two mouse buttons for X! * PD and Jmax are well tested on intel
I understand people have tried both PD and Jmax under mklinux and linuxPPC with some success, but there are definitely issues. LinuxPPC has a much better chance of working well - it is an official port of the linux kernel and is supported in the main tree, it is a monolithic kernel which seems to offer lower latency, and it has the most developers. Apple pulled the plug on mklinux to do their MacOS X (which is BSD) - mklinux is still being worked on, but it is the only actively developed Mach version of linux (I think). Many people seem to think that the microkernel design will always mean higher latencies ( I mean OS latencies not just sound ) - though this is what the NeXt was and I am not knowledgeable enough to really evaluate this. Maybe not exactly what you wanted, but I hope it helps.
Karl
On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Claude Le Berre wrote:
I plan to buy a laptop to make electronic music. I wanted to buy a G3 laptop and install linux on it (LinuxPPC).
Is there anyone that has still make pd run under maclinux and is there any problems? And generally, what is the best choice to make music with laptop (powerPC or Pentium?) and for the powerpc (mklinux or linuxPPC)?
Thank you for your answers.
CLD
| Karl W. MacMillan | | Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University | | Network and Telecommunications Services | | karlmac@peabody.jhu.edu | | 410/659-8297 |
On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Claude Le Berre wrote:
|I plan to buy a laptop to make electronic music. |I wanted to buy a G3 laptop and install linux on it (LinuxPPC).
Why laptop? My understanding is that any laptop ruins slower than an equivalent desktop. I might be wrong but I have noticed that myself and some people have mentioned it. Generally it seems that the HD access is slower and on top of that I've heard reports of audio being much noisier (picking up interference from the HD).
| |Is there anyone that has still make pd run under maclinux and is there |any problems?
I'm about to get a larger HD for my mac so I will be going back to LinuxPPC. Haven't used pd in ages but looks like it's improving. Will be reporting next year.
|And generally, what is the best choice to make music with laptop |(powerPC or Pentium?)
I've used IBM Thinkpad i1440 (MMX 266). Other than good looks it appears pretty crappy. Sound card (Yamaha OPL3-SAx) is quite noisy) and the WinModem that comes with it is not supported under linux (unless that has changed already). Under Windoze it's slower than a 200MHz desktop, behaved quite well under linux (except that modem thing) but you can't get a screen resolution higher than 800x600 which is a pain when you load a large pd patch (or do any other thing that works better on a bigger screen). In linux it perfroms better than in Windoz (I could run a fairly complex Csound orchestra in realtime).
I would probably get a PPC and wait for OSX. Rumors say that that PPCs generally outperform Pentiums.
|and for the powerpc (mklinux or linuxPPC)? |
for now LinuxPPC. Then upgrade to OSX when it becomes available.
|Thank you for your answers. | |CLD |
..... .... ...... Michal Seta ...... ..... ....
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Claude Le Berre -
Karl W. MacMillan -
Michal Seta