Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: December 2024

Your input requested for DAW Live

December 15, 2024 / / 17 Comments

It has been a long time since I had a serious look at my audio software set, and the Slackware DAW Live ISO image which is meant to showcase all of that software.

Life interfered and priorities shifted.

Now I am looking at 2025 and the Christmas holiday week which precedes it, and am pondering where to put my energy and time. Considering the lack of clarity about the next stable Slackware release (something which really annoyed me in the few years leading up to Slackware 15.0) and the relative certainty that KDE Plasma 6 is not going to be included in that next release, I am not looking forward to kickstarting my obsolete ktown repository for Plasma 6. It would eat up a lot of my time and I am a happy Plasma 5 user.
So, I decided it would be more productive and rewarding to revive the DAW and audio software project.

I will not focus on a refresher of my Slackware 15 based DAW Live Edition. I want to switch to Slackware -current, realizing full well that this may cause new frustrations along the way when stuff breaks as a result of a Slackware update, but I really want to experiment with Pipewire – for sure as a replacement for Pulseaudio but perhaps also as a replacement for the Jack Audio Toolkit. Who knows.

However, I have not been playing/experimenting with Slackware’s sound system since 2022, the whole Pipewire adventure has passed me by. If I want to rebuild & refresh that large set of software, I need to start with the basics and that is to get a low-latency ‘pro’ sound subsystem off the ground that I can understand and adapt to the needs of a Live Edition.

HELP!

Therefore a request to you, blog regulars, to help me understand how to get rid of Pulseaudo in Slackware and replace it with Pipewire. How does Jack still fit in this configuration? Should it remain the main sound server? Should Pipewire replace it, providing the binary API to Jack-enabled applications? Should the choice to have Pipewire or Jack as the main sound server be something you would want to make after login?

Anything you have already mastered and all the bugs and nasties that you have already eradicated, will save me some precious time and give me more motivation to restart the project during my Christmas break.  Use the comments section below to describe your challenges, your solutions and your resulting setup; or link to pages / pastebins that contain Slackware-specific information.

And somewhat related, since I am not a musician or audio technician: I want to understand better how to connect the audio software to audio hardware: how do you link up a DAW like Ardour to an external USB sound card, a MIDI controller keyboard, hardware synths, microphones etc.
Some synths present themselves as another external USB sound card as well – how do you deal with that when you already route your audio through your FocusRite Scarlett? It boggles the mind when you have to try and make sense of it when you do not have music-making friends in physical proximity.

Eventually I want to have a working studio in my attic and be able to create music, not just create a music production enviroment like Slackware DAW Live.

I would love to read all your feedback and hopefully it will be enough already next weekend to help me startup when my off-week starts 🙂

Cheers, Eric

GNU Screen user? How to migrate hardstatus colors to screen5

December 9, 2024 / / 7 Comments

And no, don’t try to convince me that I should switch to tmux!

I have been using GNU Screen for ages. It’s a convenient and safe way to manage a remote Linux server. Screen enables me to have multiple ‘windows’ available in a terminal, running its processes independently. When I close screen (or when my ssh connection fails), the processes contained in the remote screen session keep running.
It’s how I can compile Chromium for instance – a package compilation can take up to 12 hours. I go to sleep and the next morning I reconnect the screen client to the remote socket of the still running screen daemon and continue as if I was never away.
Yes I know that tmux is supposed to be the successor of screen, but I simply don’t care.

I operate multiple Slackware servers in remote datacenters and run screen sessions over ssh connections. To avoid any confusion about the server that I am executing commands on, I have configured screen to show relevant information in the bottom line. This concept is called “hardstatus” in screen. Here’s an example showing the three active bash prompts, highlighting  that I am currently working in ‘Window 1‘, but it also shows the server’s hostname in green and the local time in blue.

Before typing anything, I first look at the green text to confirm that I am connecting to the right server.

Now, recently Slackware-current upgraded from GNU screen 4 to version 5 and with that, an old compatibility syntax was removed – a syntax that made it easy to define the colors in that status line. But the info page which describes the syntax is probably written for even more stubborn people than me.

It took me a while to get the look and feel of my screen 4.x status line reproduced in screen 5. In fact, I fixed the hardstatus definition only today (after 4 months of barely tolerating the junked colors and finally having enough of it), and I want to share it with you.

This is what defines the status line in my Linux computers with screen 4:

# Tabbed colored hardstatus line:
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= Kd} %{= Kd}%-w%{= Kr}[%{= KW}%n %t%{= Kr}]%{= Kd}%+w %-= %{KG} %H%{KW}|%{KY}%101`%{KW}|%D %M %d %Y%{= Kc} %c%{-}'

And this is how the definition had to change for screen 5 in order to show the exact same status line:

# Tabbed colored hardstatus line:
truecolor on
hardstatus off
hardstatus alwayslastline '%{= .;#999999} %{= .;#999999}%-w%{= #ff0000;#999999}[%{= #ffffff;#999999}%n %t%{= #ff0000;#999999}]%{= .;#999999}%+w %-= %{#00ff00;#999999} %H%{#ffffff;#999999}|%{#ffff00;#999999}%101`%{#ffffff;#999999}|%D %M %d %Y%{= #00ffff;#999999} %c%{-}'

In case you are curious about my full ~/.screenrc definition file, you can find it in liveslak: https://git.liveslak.org/liveslak/tree/make_slackware_live.sh?h=1.8.1.2#n2053 – I still have to fix the hardstatus definition there though.

I hope that this helps some of you old guys.
In the comments section below, I won’t tolerate GNU haters, screen haters or other evangelists. Keep it civil.

Cheers, Eric

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