Scott Dorsey wrote:
Les Cargill wrote:
dave wrote:

How do you justify paying $200 for a computer operating system that does
nothing but send you places that ask for money? The Windows world is
like North Las Vegas. It is crass, commercial and everyone has to get
their hands dirty.

I like commercial myself. Hourses for courses...

I like commercial operating systems too, and that is why I am so upset
that Microsoft and their financing model has driven most other commercial
operating systems out of the market.

There's Solaris.

I was forced back onto that recently. Quite unpleasant. The Linuces are
much more advanced. They were actually going to Linux as the solution
to that.

And there are some commercial Linux releases like Red
Hat and SuSE that give you commercial-grade support even if they don't
give you commercial-grade product up-front.

Dunno what's not "commercial grade" about it; it's fine. The general
package management problem in Linux still persists.

And there's _sort of_ VMS
for a little while anyway.


Not a big fan of VMS.


But since the demise of BeOS there are NO realtime operating systems
intended for desktop use.

Hm. Well, I don't have much trouble with that. For "realtime", we
just write drivers. It's not a desktop, but it could be. All
you really need is one free hardware timer.

The various Atmel sized processors really kind of make a realtime
desktop moot. There's stuff like the Raspberry PI and cubieBoard
that can do all that as well.

It might be prohibitive, but I think you could build a cubieBoard
linux that interfaces to one/any of the USB2.0 interfaces using ALSA .
It has HDMI, so there's your display solution. Just NFS mount a remote
desktop/server/NAS.

If the USB2.0 interface has MIDI, you have a control surface solution.


There are some linux versions with
"soft-realtime" extensions and there are a lot of embedded system
RTOSes and there's sort of QNX if you can get them to deign to speak
to a mere customer.


Since the demise of WindRiver, it's pretty much all been Linux that I
could tell.

But I really would like to see a purpose-built DAW again, on a platform
designed for the job.

There are curious variations on the theme, like standalone VST hosts.

I kinda don't see the point of it. You can
run any of the COTS DAW packages on a stripped-down machine.

And isn't Otari still shipping RADAR?

--scott


--
Les Cargill