well, i asked here, i've searched, almost everything

but i've found nothing

I want a distro for hte common musician

equipped with a fast kernel that accepts most hardware (especially soundcards, probably ALSA) that has packages that include a basic system with all the stuff for a personal desktop/workstation and then a series of packages for music notation, midi, music recording, everything a musician would need

so...where do I start

edit: I should add, i have a general Idea of what stuff I want to put in as far as packages of software etc, but I don't know how to get it all together 1. running on my system 2. in a package for other systems

so where can i start? obviously i'll need to start with a kernel and work up, but one thing i'm not sure about is the kernel and drivers (other than ALSA)

you'll have to compile all the software to another partition (or another file),

www.linuxfromscratch.com is something you might want to look at, it will show you the basic direction you'll need to follow

hmm.. if you want to learn how to build your own linux sistem "from scratch" you could start here: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

but unless you are ready for A LOT of work (depending on how many people are involved and the experience, I would say it would take a couple of years at least) I would not go for that approach. I would go for making you own "flavour" of an existing distro. I have only worked with debian, redhat, and a little bit of suse, and from these three I would recommend debian for this job, it is used a base sistem for projects like knoppix. It already has thousands of packages available, a very good packaging system, highly customizable, and with the next release it will have better hardware recognition. It would be even easier if you just make a custom knoppix cd: good hardware recognition, boots off a cd, easy harddisk installation and all the advantages of a debian sistem, and there are several howtos on how to make a custom knoppix cd.

hope this helps!
ashley

Ok, well here's my experience from the first few runthroughs of this:

Knoppix sucks for making your own distro, especially if you had intentions like I did, which was to make something small (it takes up one WHOLE disk alone). So I went to try the same thing with Slax, the Slackware LiveCD and found linux-live.org.

This simple script makes a whole iso image of your computer that you just burn to a cd, boot, (and since i'm making a new distro) perform a hd install.

So check it out at http://linux-live.org (anybody who's been following) and it occured to me that even if you're happy with a distro, you can travel with your desktop with this by just making a bootable cd of your os and files whenever you need to go somewhere (assuming it will still fit on a cd )

American Psycho, rather than creating your own audio-oriented distro from scratch, you're probably better off exploring some of the multimedia distros that already cover the same ground that you're proposing.

First stop: AGNULA, or "A GNU/Linux Audio" distribution. It comes in two flavours: Debian-based and Red Hat-based. It's objective is to become the reference distribution for pro audio applications.

Second stop: Dyne::Bolic, a LiveCD multimedia distro. It's hackable, so with some patience and work, you can remaster it to fit your own custom needs.

Caveat: I haven't tried either of those two distros. They're both actively developed, so you can peruse both sites for more information. Good luck!

i'll look, but are you sure that they're a musician's linux, and not a music lover's linux

difference: a musician's linux is more focused on notation editing, possibly some musical documentation, and obviously few, but good media players....while a music lover's linux is more of audio storing, sorting, burning, etc....(that's how i view it anyway)

edit: after going through those sites, that's still not quite what i'm looking for, those are multimedia oriented i wans a musician's orientation

while it does need good audio multimedia support, it needs some documentation (the more the better) on music history and theory....it also needs a choice of music notation tools as well as a way of printing music once it's been written in a notation editor

ok, well i've got it down to choosing which distro to start with:

(in order of most preffered to least preferred):

slackware
debian
mandrake
redhat

now, keep in mind that debian, mandrake, and redhat all have rpms and packages for many music programs, such as rosegarden, so would that help to ahve that? even still i've preffered slack because generally i've preferred it over any other distro

If you're looking for a music notation tool, then the best program for that under Linux is Rosegarden, but you don't need to roll a custom distro just for that. Knoppix includes it by default.

Probably your best bet is to go with the DeMuDi (Debian) flavour of AGNULA and apt-get whatever you need, like Rosegarden. Or, remaster dyne:bolic to include Rosegarden and other music tools.

Regarding documentation on music theory and history, that would be better as a website than as part of distro documentation.

You know, I've just looked over AGNULA some more, and it seems pretty impressive. AGNULA is essentially a research project for professional musicians, composers and sound engineers. Take a look at some of the packages either implemented or proposed: ALSA, Jack, csound, LADCCA out of the box. A GUI for csound, called Cecelia, developed by and for composers and sound designers. JMax and NyQuist, programming environments for music.

well i'm not just going to be including rosegarden, i'm going to try to get other tools such as documentation on music theory, history, etc as well as other tools a musician would need, maybe even a hefty links page or something, we'll see...

I have built other distros around Slackware, and it has worked very well. I would go with that.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by American Psycho

Knoppix sucks for making your own distro, especially if you had intentions like I did, which was to make something small (it takes up one WHOLE disk alone). So I went to try the same thing with Slax, the Slackware LiveCD and found linux-live.org.

QUOTE]

knoppix has a lot of packages on it, many that you may not need, but you can (very easily) customize one, some knoppix derivates fit in less than 100 MB. but there are a lot of different live cds out there...