Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 9
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Pros:
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Excellent hardware support
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Cons:
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None yet
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[I'm adding this as a review...shouldn't have posted it as the description. Apologies to all who need them.]
Very well-executed distro. I'm quite impressed so far. And I've thrown some pretty major challenges at it...
Platform: Dell D610 laptop with WiFi
Added after installation: Logitech ClearChat Pro USB headphones and...then...an M-Audio Oxygen 8 V2 USB keyboard.
Results: initial installation went off without hitch. WiFi card worked with no drama even during the install process. ALSA & JACK worked fine but I soon realized the built-in sound on this computer is junk – terrible hiss and audio garbage coming from the video system.
Since I have no plans to record from this source and only want to hear the results of my musical puttering, I elected to try out some USB headphones. Logitech seemed to have a good rep from what I could see from posts. Plugged them in and was rewarded with full functionality without having to futz around.
One problem, though. They were coming in secondary to the awful built-in sound card. After an hour of researching, I came across this succinct, well-written posting:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449&highlight=2+sound+card+ubuntu+problem
I followed the instructions for setting a default sound card and it worked like a charm. In initial testing, I thought I had a problem: lots and lots of xruns from JACK. Turned out that I had forgotten to check the “realtime” box. Box checked...zero xruns.
Today's issue was supposed to be the arduous task of getting the Oxygen 8 V2 to work. I spent some time reading postings about getting M-Audio midi products to work. All kinds of stuff about loading firmware images and other esoteric ephemera. “Oh, boy,” I thought, “this will prove to be a challenge.”
Um...well...I plugged it in and it worked. JACK gave the keyboard its blessing and Qsynth confirmed full functionality. Where was the drama?
I have no doubt something, somewhere will prove to be a challenge. But from what I've seen so far, the 'something' will most likely be related to user error.
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