I am very new to Linux. I installed Red Hat 9 a few months ago on my main work computer and I am quite pleased with it.

I an attempt to learn as much as I can about Linux, I want to gain as much exposure to it as possible. To that end, I have been given the job of setting up a system for my church's sound booth that will be used to record audio, convert the audio to MP3, perform basic editing, burn CDs, and play back some sound files over the PA system.

What would be the best distribution to handle these tasks?

I have tried Red Hat 9 but it is so sluggish. Windows 95 or 98 would perform better but as I mentioned before I would really like to stick with Linux if possible. Is it fair to say that Linux running a GUI is slower than a Windows machine?

Thank you for your help!

Andy

Any of them will work, you just need to customize your machine, maybe get a lighter desktop, that means don't run Gnome or KDE, and remove services you may not need running, that are running.

All Linux distributions are the same, its just how they're installed and what packages are included, but when you strip them all down, they're all the same and they all qualify with your requests, etc.

Good luck in choosing....

It's fair to say that a Linux box that is running KDE or GNOME is probably slower than the same box running 95 or 98. The speed and responsiveness of your box all depends on what you decide to run on it. The overhead that you get from running GNOME and Nautilus as a file manager is a bit much for some older boxes. I like a light-weight GUI like blackbox or IceWM with mc for a file manager.

Do you already know what software you are going to use to record/convert/edit with?

My advice would be this - try out Mandrake 9.1 on that same box, (I suggest 9.1 for all newbies), do a custom install by selecting every package that you want on the box individually. It is somewhat slower than some of the minimalist distros, but it is definitely a good distro to get your feet wet with as it is very easy to configure and administer. The installation of software and whatnot is also pretty damn easy. If you don't put KDE and GNOME on the box it will perform much better. I like the following Window Managers on MDK - IceWM, blackbox, xfce, all of those come with the distro so you can mess around with all of them and find one that works for you.

Also all of the tasks that you want to do, (other than some of the more advanced editing that can be done in a GUI), can be done at the command line, which once you learn what you are doing you'll probably find easier than using the GUI for the work you desribed above. LAME, oggenc, cdplay, mpg123, cdrecord, alsamixer, and amixer all work great on my boxes.

If you need any help feel free to ask, I do lots of recording and audio work on Linux, so I imagine I've dealt with most of the issues you might run into before.

Thank you both for your input.

I have already learned a couple thinks since the only GUIs I knew of were KDE and GNOME.

Read_Icculus, you sound like just the person who can answer some of my audio questions. No, I don't know what audio tools to use to accomplish the tasks that I previously mentioned. It doesn't bother me to use the command line but how do you check audio levels without a GUI?

Secondly, while searching the web for audio tools I have come across OGG several times. What exactly is it?

Thanks,

Andy

OGG is another type of format that is sort of like mp3 technology. Its cd quality type sound but compressed so the files are so big, etc.

Can you record to an OGG file directly or do you need to covert a raw sound file to an OGG?

Can you burn an audio CD from an OGG file?

Andy

I'm sure that's not a problem if you have the correct support installed, etc. Check out http://www.vorbis.com/ for more information about ogg format's.

OK. Thanks!

Andy