I am cleansed…

I’m making this post from Konqueror…runing on a new install of SuSe linux…and I feel so much better for it ;)
It’s been too long since I’ve had linux installed…It was my desktop operating system of choice for 5 years..and still is, but various different circumstances have conspired over the last year to prevent me from running it on anything other than my servers. But today, when discusing audio applications with some of the guys at work, I did some browsing around, and discovered that the Linux audio scene appears to have advanced significantly from where it was a few years ago when I last had a serious look at it.
Applications like Rosegarden, Audacity, JACK, and the LADSPA project, as well as quite a few others, seem to imply that I might actually be able to do some serious audio work in Linux. So this evening I managed to juggle a few hard drives around so that I could put a second drive in Awen – my music workstation, and rather than just installing Debian again, I figured I’d give SuSe a go, since it has a pretty good reputation, and I’d never used it before.
So far, I’m in two minds about it…I think it’s definitely a huge improvement over RedHat from an end user usability point of view – the configuration tools are excellent and very consistent….but it’s still a big bloated desktop distribution like RedHat, which was evident when I was unable to get a base installation with X under 1 gig.
With Debian I would have been able to install a much lighter base from which to work…it’s just a pity I’m kind of fed up with the mess that is Debian’s X install….particularly the font configuration.
I might have to give Gentoo a go when I’ve got some time to sit down and go through the installation process (I’d do a stage 1 install, or there’d be no point), but that’s for another day…..

I’m currently in the process of compiling Rosegarden….and I’ll probably post my thoughts on it and a few other tools I try once I’ve given them a fair go.