Scott Dorsey wrote:
Les Cargill wrote:

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.

See, I would consider Solaris a lot more advanced, in terms of actually having
a solid kernel that has been well-debugged and is stable. Turn off the stupid
java gui and all that crap and you have a very solid OS that does not require
constant patching.

My complaint with Linux is mostly that the Linux community is constantly
changing things, and they often don't change them for the better or the
worse, they just change them for the sake of changing them. This seems like
misplaced effort on the part of developers, but what bothers me is that now
I have to change my stuff unnecessarily.

I would much prefer a system that was actually designed, where someone sat
down and made a decision about what the thing was supposed to do and then
built it to do that and then removed bugs rather than added features.

But... when systems are built like that, they aren't systems for everything,
they are systems for the one thing the designer decided it was supposed to
do. And if that's not what you want... that should be fine because there
should be plenty of other systems out there to do other things.

It's the lack of those other systems that I am bemoaning.

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.

Every week someone finds some security vulnerability that needs to get
patched. Every week someone makes some unneeded change. If there is a
problem with a third-party device driver I can't call up DEC support
on a three-way call and have the DEC developers working with the third-party
guys to fix the problem.

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.

No, you don't just write drivers. If you want an actual hard realtime
system you either need to wrest control away from the OS and do everything
as one uninterruptable process, or you need an operating system with a
scheduler that assigns timeslices to processes based upon how much time
those processes need to make deadline. When you make a call to the operating
system, say open(), one of the parameters is how long you have to wait for
the OS to do the job, and the kernel will prioritize the call appropriately
to make sure all those calls return in time.

The alternative is just to throw CPU at the problem and hope everybody can
meet deadline. This is called "soft realtime" and sometimes it works and
sometimes it doesn't. What is evil is that sometimes it's not always obvious
at the time that data is being lost because there is no way for the kernel
or the application to flag that it's missing deadlines in many cases.

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.

Sure, but can I run a DAW on it?

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.

Could be, but I'm still holding out for hard-realtime.

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.

Which is a very, very cool idea. I just saw one being used for PA
applications not long ago!

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?

They are, which is really BeOS inside, secretly.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."