Another Experience with Ubuntu..
History
I’ve been messing about with various linux distros since about 2001, really for no other reason than because I’m a damn nerd. What mainly turns me on about using free and open source software is freedom, which has a lot of different meanings to different people, for me it boils down to ownership I can modify/edit/break my system with linux and other oss to my hearts content. Of course you can do that with Windows as well. This post isn’t supposed to be about any of this philososphical wankery. It’s about my recent experience in getting a fully capable 3D workstation running with Ubuntu Studio.
Ubuntu Studio
This flavor of debian/ubuntu came to my awareness a year and a half ago and mainly I was interested in exploring the JACK audio system and LADSPA plugins. I tried the 8.04 version and after some audio driver wrestling I was reasonably satisfied with it, Xruns with ALSA became problematic because of my sound card (a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1) so I played around with some stuff and dual booted, ignoring it for quite a bit.
I built a Quad core tower to begin working with visual stuff again (3D and compositing), the laptop wasn’t cutting it even for music much anymore. Then I ran into the XP memory limit, and I realized that I would gain a lot of performance if I was both able to utilize a 64bit system and 3 gigs of memory per process. Simulations in blender an be heavy, and well I’m just a performance freak.
Since previously I had a good experience with UbuntuStudio I gave it a shot again, installing version 8.10. The install was easy as ever and everything worked great. My Audio Kontrol doesn’t work unless it has RT kernel, it kind of works, but kernel upgrades were breaking it, and since the 8.1o release of UbuntuStudio removed the rt kernel from the default install I just decided to use my onboard audio which works fine.
Graphics
One of the reasons I wanted to switch back into Linux was performance gain in 3D applications (blender), but even on my windows partition a lot of little art/graphics tasks/diversions were being done with OSS the GIMP and Inkscape.
Inkscape
This is one of my favorite applications. It makes doing vector work fun again. I love the handle features and the filters. Doing anything vector in illustrator I used to dread, probably because I never learned the application right to begin with, but inkscape is a pleasure.
Here’s where to get it http://www.inkscape.org/
The Gimp
The Gimp is difficult to wrap the mind around after using photoshop, I’ve had a love hate relationship with it. I realized the beauty of the interface and it’s features once I started using it under gnome. Multiple desktops help the application make sense, I can run it on it’s own desktop and all the floating panels don’t give me that much grief.
Get it here http://www.gimp.org/
The new version improves the whole thing alot.
Finally
Really I don’t need to go any further. Blender is its own ball of wax, I will be posting any useful tips or anything I come up with. I grew kind of bored with design stuff for a long time, what better way to rediscover it than learning all the apps.
Ubuntu works great for normal day to day tasks (Email, Documents, web browsing, music listening, etc) Compiz is a really pretty addition to Gnome.
None of this is probably news to most people who have been using Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a great example of a functional and friendly linux distro. The problems come with specialized low latency audio use and I plan on making a new partition to try out 64Studio
Comments
Leave a Reply