Ubuntu Studio Project Lead

[Scott Lavender]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 11:48 PM, Brian David <beejunk at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I'm going to play devil's advocate here, and suggest that Ubuntu Studio
> should not be user oriented.  At least, not in the sense that a main
> priority would be to make things as simple as possible.  It seems to me that
> a lot of problems have resulted from the active marketing of Ubuntu Studio
> as easy to use.
>
> At this point, I've accepted that Linux audio is never going to be easy.
> I've also accepted that this is a good thing, because the payoff is that the
> software is of higher quality and greater versatility.  My suggestion is
> that Ubuntu Studio should brand itself as a serious audio production system,
> one the provides the highest quality tools out there, but that requires
> patience and experience to utilize.  Not the easiest sell, but I'd say
> closer to reality.
>

Much discussion has occurred lately about what is Ubuntu Studio's audience.
To be honest, we really don't have too many clues.  I think we need to know
more about our current and their needs so that we can better address them.

However, I wouldn't try to sell Ubuntu Studio as "professional audio" at
this point.  JACK and Pulse Audio integration, among other things, is an
argument to this point.  I'm not saying the potential isn't there, because I
believe it is, but it would require additional work.


> Having said that, I think there are a few things that could be done to make
> Ubuntu Studio more user friendly.  The most obvious would be to make sure
> that the user is automatically put in the 'audio' and 'video' groups, and
> that firewire access is available out of the box without needing to mess
> with Ubuntu Studio Controls.  This should allow JACK to start right away for
> most users.


If you install Ubuntu Studio from the DVD, a fresh install as it has been
mentioned, the use is part of the audio group.  However, I believe this is
probably going to change for -rt capabilities.

My understanding is that the current user, the one logged in and behind the
keyboard, is the active user and the active user will have rights to -rt
audio.  So, users will not need to be explicitly included in the @audio
group.  Of course, this is under development and subject to my limited
understanding and development change.

Adding users to the @video group and enabling raw1394 might pose security
issues.  I'm not saying this is not a possibility, but rather it needs to be
discusses and explored.


> However, above all else, what Ubuntu Studio needs is much much much better
> documentation and tutorials.
>

This is something near and dear to me and is what got me involved with the
Ubuntu Studio developers and I cannot agree more.  However, the developer
team is extremely limited both quantitatively and qualitatively, therefore
any help from the user base would be most appreciated.

Another item I cannot stress to often or too much; there are many ways that
users can assist Ubuntu Studio without developer knowledge and this includes
testing, bug reports, and documentation.

Any knowledgeable user is encouraged to fix typos or outdated material and
even create new pages on the wikis.  Any user with a launchpad account can
do this!

On a final note, a long running issue for me is how often a quality rt
> kernel is left out of the releases.  On my system, at least, the RT kernel
> is the only one that gives good enough performance.  The vanilla and preempt
> kernels produce far too many x-runs.  I seem to have no problems with the
> 2.6.31 RT kernel, but it would be awfully nice to have a 32 version.
> --
> -Brian David


I see Alessio has already replied concerning the kernel so I will only
supplement his comments.  More information about kernels can be found at:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio/RealTimeKernel