so far the only thing stopping me from using linux on my laptop,is that i cant get my novation controller to work with it
it install fine,but i cant controll the vsts with the controller 
I would recommend totally avoiding 8.10 if you’re using the realtime kernel, this version of ubuntu always had issues with the RT kernel. If you want to go for realtime I’d recommend Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the RT kernel works great in 8.04. Also go with 32bit until a native 64bit version of Renoise becomes available.
I couldn’t even boot 9.04 with the realtime kernel, most people were getting a few minutes in before it crashed. I’m currently using the custom 2.29 version you mention and that works great.
Been reading as much as I can about Ubuntu Studio and a couple of other distributions today and apparently 8.10 didn’t have the real time kernel and it was brought back with the 9.04 which is meant ot be biggy as heel. Sounds like the 8.04.1 is the one to go for.
Ubuntu 8.04 also uses Pulse audio by default, plus i believed it used a resource eating window manager Compbiz by default, so all this kind of crap had to be uninstalled or at least turned off and Jack had to become the main audioserver again to make 8.04 worth while in using (and a little more responsive).
And ofcourse there was no realtime kernel for 8.04 that worked flawlessly at the time.
Even now that lots of problems were solved meanwhile, it is still more bloatware than Ubuntu Studio 7.xx
I don’t mind the office edition of Ubuntu Desktop to be like that, but for those guys who assembled Ubuntu Studio i was quite disappointed in their expressed knowledge about resource critical production environments which media environments are. At least those folks did not seem to understand some things should not end-up in a resource critical production environment.
It actually seems like making the same mistakes Microsoft made when releasing a new platform and i think such remark probably hurts a lot in the Linux world. Fortunately , the Linux technology is pretty secure, so the part where Microsoft build on top of already existing flaws is not really applicable here.
OK I still don’t know much about the different releases but my reading has shown them to go in this order.
7.04 - First release, don’t know any details.
8.04 - RT kernel, issues with latency but fairly stable.
8.10 - No RT kernel.
8.04.1 - Current stable “Hardy Heron” release. RT kernel and think some issues from initial 8.04 ironed out.
9.04 - Current bleeding edge “Jaunty Jackalope” release. RT kernel is reported as having a lot of issues on many machines.
Sorry can’t be bothered to go and find dates but think it was roughly a year from 7.04 - 8.04, then a few months through 8.10 and 8.04.1 then another yearish for 9.04 to come out a couple of months back.
Can you see anything wrong with what I’ve deduced? Documentation of the different releases isn’t as easy to find on their site as I would like. Think I’m going to give US8.04.1 a go as my first try. For some reason I was under the impression that it used Jack but could very easily be wrong.
kazakore, the only error in your list is that 7.04 is not the first Ubuntu release (it’s 4.10).
my question is when this 2.29 kernel will be added to Ubuntu? Ubuntu Studio 9.04 was a completely useless upgrade of a completely useless (for audio RT users) distribution, and it has been more than one year since this issue arose.
I was talking specifically about the Studio version, not vanilla Ubuntu. I admit that info came from Wikipedia which can’t be taken as Pure Truth but I couldn’t see evidence of a Studio package previous to that anyway either.
Afraid I wouldn’t know enough to comment. One of the main reasons I’m leaning the U.S. way is because a friend of mine uses a standard Ubuntu desktop installation so should be the easiest for me to get a bit of help with if needed. Does seem weird that they seem to have done little but break the system over the last year or so. If I find it doesn’t work out for me I might give 64Studio a try as seems a bit more active and some people seem to like it.
What I want to know is when are we going to see 64bit Renoise so we can utilize the x64 distros?
Besides x.org and alsa what other dependencies does Renoise have ?
I don’t really know much about Linux so i figured i would give LFS a go and while i learn i can try and do a build just for Renoise
I don’t want anything but Renoise in this case so what packages do i need to look at ?
Cheers
Bungle
Just thought i’d apply some knowledge I learned today. A co-worker explained that Ubuntu version numbers are, in fact, dates.
Ubuntu 7.10? Released October 2007 (i.e. 2007-10)
Ubuntu 8.10? Released October 2008 (i.e. 2008-10)
Ubuntu 9.04? Released April 2009 (i.e 2009-04)
Tada!
I also found that someone packaged Renoise for Arch Linux, making it the best distro perhaps?
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=24904
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/renoise/renoise/PKGBUILD
sweet ! I had missed that. But it’s the demo version. If you want the full one you will have to install it manually.
I’m using Ubuntu Studio 9.04 right now and I think most audio things are working just fine (Renoise, Jack and a few soft synths, Paulstretch etc) so far. Many other things on the other hand seems to freeze everything all the time etc, I have to hard boot the whole thing a lot.
Ubuntu used to work just perfectly before (I had US 7.10 for over a year and never encountered any problem) but it seemed that the upgrades after that were more for people who knew how to configure stuff and do more complicated stuff a generic user like me wouldn’t have a clue how to do.
I would switch back to 7.10 again if I knew where to get all the packages I had and have now.
7.10
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/rel…/gutsy/release/
I hear 8.04.1 is meant to be stable and working well though so may be worth giving it a try if you haven’t.
Yeah I know where to get the actual distribution, but I couldn’t find the repositories, I couldn’t install many of the programs I needed.
Will have to give 8.04 a try at some point.
I use ubuntu 9.04 with ubuntu studio package (not ubuntu studio itself). I don’t have realtime kernel, but I tweaked some configuration from a tutorial for realtime thread. Machine : notebook HP 6830s, c2d@2.26GHz, but almost on 800MHz. Sound system: ALSA. MIDI USB interface RoMI/O II, YAMAHA EX5 and Roland SH-201 connected. I run some native vst plugins as peggy2000 and audjoohelix. Runs alltogether well.
i’m running renoise on #! crunchbang, no rt-kernel, but everything runs quite nicely.
#! crunchbang looks excellent man! going to put that on my thinkpad.
its pretty sweet man, low footprint, but enough bells and whistles so you dont get bored. and very little bloatware so its pretty swift on my z60m thinkpad and desktop.
so far its the only distro where i’ve stopped looking for something else.
I didn’t see that earlier, but if you are new to linux, I suggest you not to start with LFS. That’s a great distribution for building custom systems, and installing this teaches you quite a few things, but that’s definitely not what you want if you plan to do something else than compiling programs and reading manpages. 
There are many lightweight, user friendly distros out there to choose from - most importantly, distros with package management systems.