The 64 Studio distribution ± creative and native Daniel James Free Ekanayaka 64 Studio Ltd. 64 Studio Ltd. PO Box 37 PO Box 37 Freshwater, Freshwater, PO40 9ZR, PO40 9ZR, Great Britain Great Britain [email protected] [email protected] Contents company positions its extensive range of multimedia applications as the ©Adobe Platform©. 1. The 64-bit question What this means is that regardless of the hardware 2. Package selection or operating system in use, the mainstream 3. Why Debian? creative desktop of the near future is likely to 4. The business model represent a highly integrated set of non-free 5. Challenges applications from a very small number of vendors. 6. Conclusion We can expect these proprietary applications to be 7. Acknowledgements well tested for performance, reliability and 8. References usability. 9. Appendix: Packages in version 0.6.0 We believe that it will be very difficult for Abstract GNU, Linux and other free software to compete for users on the multimedia desktop unless it can This paper describes the high integration of achieve a similar level of integration and polish. proprietary software for the creative desktop, and Without a significant user base, it becomes the effort involved in creating a free software difficult for free software to maintain the hardware alternative which will run natively on the latest 64- support that it needs. Reports indicate that it is bit x86 hardware. It outlines the author©s reasons becoming progressively more difficult to obtain for creating a 64-bit distribution based on Debian, full specifications for video card driver the packages selected, the business model of the 64 development, and several of the most popular Studio company and the challenges for future high-end audio interfaces, particularly the development. FireWire models not running BeBoB, remain without the prospect of a free software driver. We Keywords aim to deliver a viable and sustainable creative platform based on free software, and partner with 64-bit, Debian, content creation hardware manufacturers to ensure the availability of fully-supported components and peripherals. Introduction If we take a step back from pure audio software 1 The 64-bit question for a moment, and look at the state of creative desktop computing tools more generally, it©s Since any software project takes a while to get to obvious that there has been a lot of consolidation a mature stage, when we launched a new among the proprietary software vendors in the last multimedia distribution last year, we decided to couple of years. For example Yamaha swallowed concentrate on the kind of desktop systems which up Steinberg, Adobe bought Syntrillium (the we believe will be common among creative users creators of Cool Edit), Avid bought Digidesign in the future. and Apple bought Logic. Adobe©s ©partnership© with Macromedia became a takeover, and now the LAC2006 85 We©re interested in 64-bit x86 for two main found as the primary sound server in any reasons - the improvements in memory mainstream GNU/Linux distribution. I don©t think architecture, allowing commodity machines to it is difficult to use, but for the time being it still have many gigabytes of RAM, and the opportunity requires a patched kernel, and some knowledge of to drop support for legacy PC hardware. From the sample rates and buffers. Many non-musical users point of view of a distribution, any technology that just want to be able to throw audio at any sample narrows down the field of potential hardware rate to the sound card, and could care less about combinations is a great advantage. We don©t have real-time priority. to support ISA bus sound cards and we don©t have to care if the binaries won©t run on a 486. In addition, the creative user©s default selection of applications would be very different to - for That may sound a little harsh for owners of older example - a sys-admin. Even gigantic distributions hardware, but there will be plenty of 32-bit like Debian don©t package all of the specialist tools GNU/Linux distributions around for some time, needed for media creation, and the integration and the relentless downward spiral in the cost of between packages is often less than perfect. So the newer technologies looks set to make using any goal of 64 Studio is to create a native x86_64 hardware older than a year or two quite counter- distribution with a carefully selected set of creative productive. For example, the HP laptop which we tools and as much integration between them as are giving this presentation on is an entry-level possible. model from a department store in the UK. It has a 1.6GHz AMD Turion 64-bit processor and 1GB Today, we have free software applications RAM as standard. It cost less than a far slower covering many of the creative disciplines other generic white-box PC of a couple of years ago, and than audio or music, including 2D and 3D it probably uses a great deal less energy too. graphics, video, and publishing for the web or print. Unfortunately media creation, when We©ve had native 64-bit Linux on the Alpha and compared with media ©consumption©, remains a the Itanium for years, but these architectures never niche activity, even on Linux. This niche status is reached the mainstream desktop. SGI has an reflected in the fact that none of the mainstream Itanium2 based GNU/Linux desktop product Linux distributions work particularly well ©out of aimed at the creative market, but it costs US the box© for media creation - but to be fair, $20,000 per machine. Compared to Windows or Windows XP or OS X also require many any other operating system, GNU/Linux clearly additional packages to be installed before their had a head start on x86_64, and you can choose users can realise the full creative potential of their from a range of natively compiled desktop chosen platform. distributions for the hardware. Unfortunately for the creative user, all of these are aimed at the Of course specialist Linux audio distributions general purpose computing audience. It©s already exist, including AGNULA/DeMuDi, impossible to be all things to all people, and what©s Planet CCRMA, dyne:bolic and Studio to Go!, good for the so-called ©consumer© is rarely right for with a good level of integration for music-making. the content creator. But all of these other audio distributions are x86 only so far, and there are few specialist distributions in the other creative fields. 2 Package selection Ratatouille, a Knoppix-based distribution designed for animators, is one exception. For example, typical distributions use Arts or ESD to share the sound card between applications, Switching to native 64-bit software doesn©t while most GNU/Linux musicians would want to necessarily realise an instant and obvious use JACK - admittedly more complex, but far improvement in performance on the same more powerful. I (Daniel) was once asked what hardware, but we think that if we create a native was so difficult about JACK that means it isn©t platform, then application developers can begin to realise the benefits of 64-bit processor LAC2006 86 optimisation and an improved memory some confidence because I (Daniel) was able to architecture. Even in the short term, it makes more ask Michael Tiemann, former Red Hat CTO and sense than building i386 binaries. now vice president of open source, this question myself. Fedora Core remains a technology preview But there©s a problem with specialist for Red Hat Enterprise, and the Fedora Project has distributions. Since they have relatively few users, absolutely no commitment to stability or usability. they usually end up being maintained by a single If Red Hat wants to try a major update to see what person. External project funding, whether from the breaks, it can. state or a venture capitalist, is often unreliable in the long term, and can steer the agenda of the Debian does have a commitment to stability, and distribution away from that of the users. a bona-fide community process. There are other reasons for favouring Debian over Red Hat, not Since we believe maintaining a niche least of which is the long-established support in distribution is simply too much work for a Debian for seamless upgrades with apt-get, since volunteer to be expected to do, we set up a on the creative desktop we©ll be upgrading company to pay developers to create and maintain continuously. The work of the Debian Pure 64 port the system using the Custom Debian Distribution team is of a very high quality, not to mention that framework. You may know of Free©s work on of all the many Debian package maintainers. CDD from recent releases of the AGNULA/DeMuDi distribution. Most of the We recognise that whatever packages we put packages in 64 Studio come from the Pure 64 port into 64 Studio, users will want some of the of Debian testing, with some from Ubuntu, some packages that we haven©t included - so being able from DeMuDi and some custom built. to use thousands of binaries straight from the Pure 64 port without modification is a major advantage. Because we©re sticking very closely to Debian with 3 Why Debian? the 64 Studio design, users can install any application from Pure 64 simply by enabling an A more obvious choice might be Red Hat, given additional apt source. This includes most of the that many of the high end (which is to say well-known applications with the exception of expensive) proprietary tools used in Hollywood OpenOffice.org, which just won©t build natively on studios and elsewhere are sold as binary-only Red x86_64 yet.