I'm interested in installing "lilypond" which is a high quality music notation typeface. Through programs like "noteedit" (a GREAT KDE program) you can compose music and export the onscreen notation in printable form through "lilypond" (a command-line app). When I visited the Lilypond website I noticed that they have a Slack 9 package but not a 9.1 or 10 package. I would consider compiling "lilypond" from source, BUT their site warns that users should install their software from distro specific packages because source compilation is very tricky. So, my question for the Slack experts is....can I install the Slack 9 pack from their website on my Slack 10.0 machine? I suppose I could try installing the pack and see what happens, but since I am a weary novice I thought I would ask the experts first. Thanks for your input!!

Yes you can install "older" packages.

The problem would be the inverse: if you wanted to install a newer package with an older distribution. You sometimes have dependencie errors because you're not up to date and such.

Yay, another Lilypond user!

You may occasionally have problems with older packages, but generally they should work with newer versions. I'm using that 9.0 package of Lilypond and have had no problems with it.

I'm eager to start using Lilypond for the first time. My wife and I are band directors. We've used Finale before with success. Now that we have Linux on 2 of our machines. we would like to use Noteedit with Lilypond for all of our notation projects. I tried testing out Noteedit and Lilypond when we were running Fedora, BUT when we would try converting the Lilypond file (generated by Noteedit) into a postscript (.ps) file in order to print, I got a variety of errors. So, I have YET to use lilypond successfully. Hopefully, that will change.

If I can get everything working properly, we will be using Noteedit/Lilypond to notate some music for my wife's marching band.

Out of curiousity, what is the proper series of commands to convert a lilypond file to a printable .ps file?? I followed the instructions on the noteedit site, but had no success.

Thanks!