KXStudio rocks my socks off

KXStudio is an audio focused Linux distribution based off of Kubuntu 10.04, and for the past week  I have been living in KXStudio on my HP Mininote.

I must confess in advance to not being a KDE 4 fan in the past,  but after living the dream in KXStudio, I’m hitting the KDE Koolaid and hitting it hard.

Sure, I could rave on about the beauty of the desktop environment and how it really enhances my work flow, but I’ll move onto the main reason I think this is an important milestone in Linux audio.

What really interests me most is that the developer (Falktx) a young fellow from Portugal has made the decision to make the Jack audio server run at boot.  No messing around.  This is the kind of gutsy move I’ve been waiting for to upgrade my Desktop box.

Rest assured that whatever doesn’t run through the Jack audio sound server will run through the Pulseaudio to Jack bridge and you’ll be ready to rock those video sound samples, SIP or mumble VOIP calls into an armed track in Ardour.

Not only has Falktx included the latest audio applications – too numerous to list, he’s also given you Abigoni’s low latency kernel (through PPA), Ardourvst (vst support enabled Ardour through the wine emulation layer),  free VST plugins, the LADI tools for session management, and you could also take a peak at  Ardour 3.0 with ease – it’s in the repos and will install to /opt so you don’t need to worry about it borking whats working.

KXStudio has both 32 bit and 64 bit DVD ISO’s as well as NETinstall disks, and a recent revision to the distro brings some important fixes rolling it up to its current 10.04.1 release.

I have flip flopped between running audio specific Linux distributions and regular Linux distributions fitted with the audio applications of my choice and configured the way I like.  There are pros and cons to both methods, the pros being everything is setup for you, and the cons being, well –  everything is setup for you and it may not be exactly as you like.

KXStudio for me makes the best case for a pre-configured best of breed Linux Audio Distribution and I see no reason to remove it from my laptop, and many reasons to consider dropping it onto my Desktop.

I took this screenshot because it shows one of the compelling reasons for me to switch – the latest jack and the pulse to jack bridge which will allow for a skype free podcast.   Very important to note as of now that the PULSE-JACK bridge is only reliable in a NON RT kernel, so Generic and Low Latency are fine, but RT will crash PULSE-JACK after a minute of running.

KXStudio project website can be found at http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/