Well, I managed to hose my Ubuntu Studio installation on the Dell. I wanted to try an upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy as it was released last week. As I've customized this machine a lot over the last few months I figured the upgrade wouldn't go smoothly. Sure enough it didn't.

After getting about 75 to 80 percent through installing all of the packages one of the package install scripts must have unloaded a bunch of modules, then the install script for am-utils hung trying to shut down amd, since there was no network. Then Ubuntu's upgrade installer thingie just kind of bailed on me.

I did manage to complete some of the upgrade, but now my desktop was in a pretty bad state. So I decided to do what I usually do, log into X using the fail-safe x-term, start up metacity manually, then run firefox and grab the install CD for the most recent release of Ubuntu Studio. I got that downloaded and burned to DVD (luckily gnomebaker works just fine without the rest of GNOME running), backed up a bunch of other stuff to DVD (love DVD-R) and rebooted. Certainly it can't be that simple, can it?

Well, no it can't be that simple. Upon reaching the initial installation screen it seems that Ubuntu Studio's installer didn't want to detect my USB keyboard. I went and hunted down a USB-to-PS/2 adapter for my keyboard and then found that my machine (it's the XPS 410) actually doesn't have PS/2 ports. Guess that's why there's like 20 USB ports on this thing. That was kind of a deal-breaker for Ubuntu Studio, I kind of looked around for a second or two to see if there was an easy fix, but didn't honestly spend any time on it.

I rather wanted to try out some of the other audio-focused Linux distributions. I finally settled on 64 Studio. It's Debian based, so it's not all that different from Ubuntu, I've really come to like apt and also just like the way Debian distros are set up. Anyway, 64 Studio installed cleanly out of the box. I naturally enabled the testing repositories to get more recent versions of all of the applications. The only snag I ran into there was with one of the packages related to bootsplash, but I was able to quickly find a fix.

So far I really like it. It comes with the real-time kernel set up out of the box, so I was able to get a good low latency set up right away. I also tried their tutorial on how to get VST stuff running but I found it's still far from perfect, I had to increase jackd's buffer sizes up to the point where the latency was unacceptable. But that's okay, I don't really have any VSTs that I've been dying to use anyway, there's plenty of great native DSSI/LADSPA plugins to use.

My initial impression when logging in is that the desktop environment reminds me of CentOS. Probably because it's the same GNOME version. But the nice thing is they actually bothered to make a menu entry for envy24control, something the Ubuntu Studio folks didn't do (maybe it's got an entry in the Gutsy version though). As I have this card it's an essential app.

Damn Iestyn, he's right on about me changing desktops every couple months.