Thursday, October 9, 2008

linux interactive music

linux is a pretty interesting alternate operating system, and has a very interesting global culture and userbase. there are a few linux 'distro's [distributions] which are dedicated to multimedia.

this stuff tends to be less userfriendly than mac OSx or windows, but is also very powerful - and free of charge.

there are two distro's i've been looking at.

dyne:bolic is a sort of general-purpose multimedia and communication tool:
www.dyne.org

the dyne people have backed down off their soapbox a bit, but they used to describe this as a toolset to enable videoblogging out of a war zone, amongst other things like transmitting realtime VJ performances and VoIP. right now it looks like a small but pretty ardent global community.



pure:dyne is a more specific media tool that is being used for 'netjams' and such things. the apps aren't exactly end-user toys, but there's a lot of good to be found in this thing, i think:

http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/

pd/puredyne is probably something geared more to university types.

ubuntu is a desktop distro that's been getting very popular over the last few years. recently, they released a 'media' version, called Ubuntu Studio:

http://ubuntustudio.org/

i've not had chance to work with this yet, although several friends have downloaded it and seem to like it quite a bit.

x

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