KXstudio 10.4 - comparison to Ubuntu Studio 10.4

[Steve Meiers]

Hello,

If anyone is interested in other Ubuntu Studio variants and how they compare, 
I've been testing KXstudio, also based on Ubuntu but on the KDE variant, 
Kubuntu. I have had a great user experience with both, and only a few minor 
glitches. So I'll try to list the good and the bad and some things I think both 
devs and other users might find interesting.

My host system is an HP tx2510us, a 10.2 inch touchscreen notebook with AMD 2x 
Turion, ATI graphics, 3GB  RAM, 250GB HD, and Vista native.

I first installed Ubuntu Studio (UbS) 10.4, the original first non-beta release, 
with the following results:

Good - UbS
====
1. Simple dual boot installation with Grub2. Vista also survived the 
installation, for occasional "work" related use. No boot issues.
2. Ethernet, no problem either - it configured automatically on UbS  
installation. No issues.
3. Touchscreen worked very well immediately after installation! Finger or 
stylus. Not so with any previous Ubuntu release, this was a great improvement 
over previous releases with very complex touchscreen config procedures!
4. Basic audio features were available, played audio files and videos. No 
problem.
5. Display was excellent.
6. All drives worked perfectly, internal, USB, DVD burner, SD, etc. No media 
issues.
7. Webcam works with Cheese.

Bad - UbS
===
1. Wifi was not available using the internal Broadcom 4328 interface and could 
not be resolved. I could however plug in an inexpensive Airlink USB 802.11g 
adapter and it was recognized instantly.  I installed the proprietary Broadcom 
driver, but this did not work despite many hours experimenting with it.
2. Jack and MIDI could not be resolved. I tried for days to get these to work so 
I could use ZynAddSubFX and other soft synths, but to no avail. For this reason, 
I decided to try KXstudio when I heard about it. I am a UbS fan for the audio 
tools.

I later installed KXstudio (KxS) 10.4, the first  release, with the following 
results:

KXstudio - Good
=======
1. Simple installation with Grub2 boot manager.
2. Ethernet, no problem either - it configured automatically on UbS  
installation. No issues.
3. Touchscreen worked very well immediately after installation! Finger or 
stylus.
4. Basic audio features were available, played audio files and videos.  No 
problem.
5. Display was excellent.
6. All drives worked perfectly, internal, USB, DVD burner, SD, etc. No  media 
issues.
7. Jack2 was automatically configured and ran any of the softsynths I tried 
right after installing. MIDI did not work through Jack2, but using Patchage 
solved the MIDI connectivity issues. KxS uses Jack2 to manage all the audio 
drivers, including ALSA, OSS and others. I didn't need to enable anything ever, 
like when I browse, and then back to a Rosegarden, it all works all the time.
8. Wine was easy to configure and I got FruityLoops 8 running perfectly in 
minutes, except for MIDI. Same for several other Windows audio apps. I didn't 
get this far in UbS.

KXstudio - Bad
=======
1. I cannot access my Vista partitions now - my main problem with KxS. I spent a 
lot of time, but can't fix this yet.
2. Wifi was not available using the internal Broadcom 4328 interface. I could 
however plug in an inexpensive Airlink USB  802.11g adapter and it was 
recognized instantly.  I installed the proprietary Broadcom driver and got wifi 
working, but I have to do this every time I boot the system, it does not retain 
the configuration, despite asking for root password on installation.
3. Not widely adopted, nothing like UbS. No userbase to ask questions, but if I 
can fix the two issues above, it seems to have all the audio issues resolved, 
that UbS seems to be struggling with.

Summary
=======
KbS seems to be the winner on my system, except for the boot and wifi issues. I 
think these could be fixed by a better Linaut, but I struggle with this too much 
already and want to spend more time doing music than becoming a Linux guru. Not 
sure what to do about this yet. I say this because I need a system that does the 
audio tools well and it all seems to work on the KxS installation. Maybe the UbS 
devs can look at KxS to see how some of their problems were resolved, and 
vice-versa. Seems to be one main dev named Falk on the KxS project, whereas UbS 
appears to have at least a few dozen. But maybe they can learn something from 
each other's work and move both further forward. There are excellent things 
about both and I appreciate the fine work the devs on both projects have done. I 
just find that on this hardware, the KX variant is working better out of the box 
right now. Some fixes might push either ahead of the other though. 


Cheers, happy Ubunting!

tekrytor
at yahoo dot com

PS: If anyone knows how to fix Grub2, my Vista boot issue, or my wifi tragedy, 
I'm all pointy ears.