[dorkbotpdx-blabber] Good news on openSUSE

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Jason Plumb <jason at noisybox.net> wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> <snip>
>>
>> I'm going to go ahead and attempt to build pd-extended from source on
>> this machine in 32-bit mode, just so I can see what I'm missing. :)
>
> I've been running 64-bit Pd on 64-bit debian on AMD64 for the last couple
> years.  It's pretty well supported and vanilla Pd is totally easy to build
> from sources.  Plan on problems trying to compile/run all of extended tho.
>  :)

Debian / Ubuntu have much better support for audio than openSUSE at
the moment in general. So does Fedora, because of Planet CCRMA. If I
were building a dedicated audio system, I'd go with the Ubuntu
spin-off 64Studio. But this is a general purpose laptop.

The "all of extended" build farm at "puredata.info" doesn't even have
a process for building on 32-bit openSUSE, and their 64-bit Ubuntu
build still has lots of manual hacks. Once I figure out what I'm
working on this week, if it turns out to be audio, I'll try and get a
full 32-bit pd-extended build going on openSUSE. My crash-and-burn
laptop turned out to be unnecessary for the workshop, so I can nuke
the Ubuntu I put on it and reload openSUSE 32 bit. :)

> My approach is mostly to run vanilla and tackle individual extensions
> if/when I need 'em.

I would actually be surprised if I needed any extensions for what I'm
doing. It's pure algorithmic composition and synthesis. It started
life as a Perl script generating score files for "sfront", a
CSound-like gizmo that never caught on, and evolved into a Lisp
program driving MIDI.

The third iteration is probably going to be in pd, but I haven't ruled
out anything that can synthesize music programmatically, such as
CSound, ChucK and Common Music / Grace. And there's an offboard
statistical piece that will most likely be done in R. R *can*
synthesize music, but not really in real time.
-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.