pure:dyne or Ubuntu Studio?

[Dave Seidel]

I would like to set up a dual boot on my WinXP laptop with a Linux distro, and I am considering either pure:dyne or Ubuntu Studio. My primary applications at the moment are Csound, SuperCollider, and Audacity. But I'm interested in delving into other software as well, e.g., PD and Processing. Real-time capability is important.

Any opinions on which of these distros might be better? Is there another one that I should consider?

[Jeff Harrington]

This may be naive but isn't latency the main issue? So wouldn't audio driver support be the real determinant.

[Dave Seidel]

Yes, but I expect them to be reasonably equivalent in that regard. They're both based on Debian with a kernel tweaked for low latency, and they should support the same drivers.

Jeff Harrington said:

This may be naive but isn't latency the main issue? So wouldn't audio driver support be the real determinant.

[Paul H. Muller]

I have used Slax (www.slax.org) on a thumb drive. This avoids all the drama of dual booting and you can run on any PC that will boot from a thumb drive. On my 2 GHz machine Slax runs fine - no speed issues. I have not tried loading any of the applications you describe, however.

[Dave Seidel]

Thanks, Paul. Slax looks interesting, but both pure:dyne and Ubuntu Studio are specifically tuned (at the kernel level) for real-time multimedia use, and are loaded with lots of audio/video apps. I ended up going with Ubuntu Studio, becsuse the pure:dyne docs were really inadequate, and Ubuntu makes dual-boot installation quite painless. In any case, I'm only interested in doing this on my laptop, so I don't need a portable boot.

Paul H. Muller said:

I have used Slax (www.slax.org) on a thumb drive. This avoids all the drama of dual booting and you can run on any PC that will boot from a thumb drive. On my 2 GHz machine Slax runs fine - no speed issues. I have not tried loading any of the applications you describe, however.