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My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: daw (Page 1 of 4)

Your input requested for DAW Live

December 15, 2024 / / 7 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

Liveslak 1.8.0 – more filesystems supported, lots of fixes

September 18, 2023 / / 16 Comments

Liveslak updates! Quite soon after my August ISO refresh, I used some free moments to implement a request of sorts and fix some longstanding bugs.
Version 1.8.0 of the liveslak scripts is now available, containing these enhancements and fixes.
Links to the liveslak git repository and download locations are at the bottom of this post. Of course, the new functionality and fixes are also present in a fresh batch of Slackware Live ISO images.

New features of liveslak 1.8.0

  • LUKS encrypted containers for your homedirectory and for persistence are now supporting many more filesystems, not just ext2/4 but also btrfs, f2fs, jfs or xfs. The lack of f2fs support was mentioned by a visitor of this blog and I thought that was useful feedback.
    The accompanying scripts iso2usb.sh and isocomp.sh now support this filesystem choice via a new ‘-F‘ switch.
    Note that the Linux partition of a USB Live thumbdrive remains ext4 formatted, because liveslak uses extlinux to boot on a BIOS computer.
  • The upslak.sh script can now extend the size of the  LUKS encrypted container files on your USB thumbdrive, in case you run out of storage there.
  • I fixed the pxeserver script and expanded its functionality:
    • PXE boot of a UEFI computer finally works.
      Note that this may not work for you out of the box, because there are two implementations in dnsmasq to support UEFI PXE boot… and sometimes, one will work and the other won’t. So, you may have to open the /usr/local/sbin/pxeserver script in an editor and look for the section where a number of ‘dhcp-match‘ and ‘dhcp-boot‘ lines is commented out. If you remove the comment characters from these 8 lines and instead, add a comment character ‘#’ in front of the ‘dhcp-match‘ and ‘pxe-service‘ lines a bit higher up, your UEFI computer might actually succeed in booting over the network.
    • NAT firewalling can be optionally enabled in case PXE clients wouldn’t have Internet access otherwise.
  • I fixed the hang during shutdown/reboot when liveslak is a PXE client.
  • I fixed UEFI boot using GRUB when the live ISO had been ‘dd’-ed or ‘cp’-ed directly to a USB thumbdrive. You would end at the GRUB prompt instead of booting into the OS.
    It took me quite a while because this bug was introduced in Feb 2019 (!), and I never found the time to investigate. Eventually looking into it during a weekend of solitude caused an epiphany.
  • I added support for a dark theme in KDE Plasma based ISOs, with the LEAN ISO as an example (that one also gets a new login/desktop background image taken from my photo collection with every ISO refresh).
  • Lots of other small fixes and enhancements, read the Git log for more information.

Booting from an on-disk ISO file

Liveslak supports Ventoy, a multi-boot manager for removable media like USB thumbdrives which lets you boot any ISO image you store on the disk, selecting from a GRUB menu it creates on the fly.
Because liveslak  implements the “Ventoy-compatible” guideline, any Slackware Live ISO works out of the box on Ventoy. Support for encrypted persistence and homedirectory containers on a Ventoy disk is offered by the ISO companion script ‘isocomp.sh‘.
You can find the details in the git commit message.

Install Slackware using a liveslak ISO

A quick reminder that you can use a liveslak ISO to install Slackware to your hard drive from its official package repository (using a network installation from a HTTP, FTP, NFS or Samba server).
You can also install the actual content of the Live ISO to your harddisk if you like. In this case all “live aspects” will be skipped during the copy, so that you will in fact end up with a completely regular Slackware on your harddisk.
The program to run these installations is available on all liveslak ISOs and is called ‘setup2hd‘. It is derived from the ‘setup‘ program of a Slackware install media, but has some nice enhancements: it launches cfdisk/cgdisk for you to partition your disks, lets you create a regular user, and allows you to configure a basic firewall.
Best of all, you can run setup2hd in an X-terminal and let the installer chomp through the packages while you browse the internet, watch a video or perform any other kind of leisurely activities on your Live OS.

And by the way: booting Slackware Live is the only way (using setup2hd) to install the official Slackware distro from a network server across a wireless connection. The official Slackware installer only supports wired network connections.

Get liveslak ISOs

The various variants of Slackware Live Edition can be found in the “latest” subdirectory at https://download.liveslak.org/ or its US mirror https://us.liveslak.org/ . A fast UK mirror is provided by Darren Austin at https://slackware.uk/liveslak/ .
You’ll be able to download ISO Live images of 32bit and 64bit Slackware proper, also of the small XFCE variant for (both architectures), and then CINNAMON, DAW, LEAN and MATE ISOs that only come in 64bits.
Big thanks to Willy Sudiarto Raharjo (willysr) for maintaining the Mate and Cinnamon Slackware package repositories.
Also have a look in the “bonus” subdirectory! There you’ll find Nvidia graphics and Broadcom wireless binary drivers, Wine 8 and multilib modules to add if you use the persistent version of liveslak.

All ISOs containing a 64bit Live Slackware have support for SecureBoot.

Get liveslak sources

The liveslak project is hosted in git. Its browsable cgit interface is here: https://git.liveslak.org/liveslak/

A set of the liveslak scripts can also be downloaded from http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/ or https://slackware.nl/people/alien/liveslak/

Have fun! Eric

August’23 refresh of Slackware Live ISO collection

August 21, 2023 / / 15 Comments

Last weekend I pushed version 1.7.0.1 of liveslak code to my git repository and used it to generate a fresh batch of Slackware Live ISO images.

Main change between 1.7.0 and 1.7.0.1 is fixing the broken Ventoy support on UEFI computers. Slackware Live ISO works out of the box on Ventoy again. The documentation will help you setup persistence for the live ISO on a Ventoy disk.

Get liveslak ISOs

The various variants of Slackware Live Edition can be found in the “latest” subdirectory at https://download.liveslak.org/ or its US mirror https://us.liveslak.org/ . A fast UK mirror is provided by Darren Austin at https://slackware.uk/liveslak/ .
You’ll be able to download ISO Live images of 32bit and 64bit Slackware proper, also of the small XFCE variant for (both architectures), and then CINNAMON, DAW, LEAN and MATE ISOs that only come in 64bits.
The DAW ISO is based on Slackware 15.0 (including all patches to date) to offer a sense of stability, whereas all the other ISOs are based on Slackware-current update “Fri Aug 18 18:37:33 UTC 2023“.

All ISOs containing a 64bit Slackware have support for SecureBoot.

Also have a look in the “bonus” subdirectory! There’s Nvidia binary graphics driver, Broadcom STA wirelesss driver, Wine 8 and multilib modules to add if you use the persistent version of liveslak.

Get liveslak sources

The liveslak project is hosted in git. Its browsable cgit interface is here: https://git.liveslak.org/liveslak/

A set of the liveslak scripts can also be downloaded from http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/ or https://slackware.nl/people/alien/liveslak/

Have fun! Eric

Surge XT synthesizer added to my Slackware DAW software collection

June 16, 2023 / / 15 Comments

The Surge XT synthesizer was recently mentioned in the comments section of another post, and I thought, why not add it to my DAW collection?
So, here it is 😉

Surge XT is a virtual synthesizer originally released as “Surge” into open source by creator Claes Johanson in September 2018. Since then, it is maintained by a group of volunteers. The most recent release of Surge XT is just a month old and this version 1.2.3 is the one I packaged for you, ready for Slackware 15.0 and -current and in 32bit as well as 64bit flavors. Find it via slakfinder.

If you have my “daw_base” package installed (and you should if you intend to use any of my DAW packages!) the package adds itself into the “Slackware DAW” menu in Multimedia (unless if you use the standard Kicker menu of Plasma5 which does not adhere to Linux interface standards, Surge XT will just install itself straight into the Multimedia menu).
Surge XT can be used as a LV2, VST3 or CLAP plug-in instrument in a host program like Ardour. If you want a quick intro into the synth, check out this Music Radar page.

Let’s share a screenshot of its main interface:

Followed by its “about” window:

This package was not trivial to create. Especially adding the LV2 plugin support was not easy. Surge source releases starting with 1.3.0 will have LV2 plugin support out of the box. For the 1.2.3 release I had to add a fork of the JUCE source code which adds that support. This functionality is folded back into a newer version of JUCE which is not yet used by Surge 1.2.x.
I don’t know if I did the packaging 100% correct, so let me know where you stumble. You can try the Flatpak version to compare if you are already an experienced user of Surge, which would help me with potential improvements 😉 I have an article on adding Flatpak support to Slackware.
And to be honest, I have no clue yet how to use Surge, so by all means try it out and tell me your story. Ideally, also share some of the music you created using this synth!

A quick reminder about this old “pro tip” for easy upgrade/installation:
If you use slackpkg together with the slackpkg+ extension, you can download a DAW template here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/tools/templates/daw.template containing a full list of all my DAW packages. Copy this template file into “/etc/slackpkg/templates/” and use the command “slackpkg update; slackpkg install-template daw; slackpkg upgrade-all” to get all those new packages installed effortlessly, and obtain all the upgrades as well.
And if you installed my daw_base package, this template will already be available in “/etc/slackpkg/templates/”!

Enjoy, Eric

DAW Live based on Stable Slackware 15?

December 21, 2022 / / 34 Comments

Someone recently contacted me with the request to base Slackware Live DAW edition on a stable Slackware release like 15.0 instead of using Slackware -current. The rationale being that it would bring relative peace of mind not having to worry about daily updates and potential sudden breakage of your audio applications.
Instead you would only have to worry about applying security updates and as a result have a solid DAW experience.

I think that is a fair question and I have nothing against that switch. The DAW variant is a specialist variant unlike the others.
So, anyone against such a move for the Live DAW ISO, from -current to stable Slackware?

I have a fresh DAW Live ISO ready, it is based on Slackware64-15.0 and will upload that in a short while unless there is some serious ground not to do this.

Naturally, all other Slackware Live variants for which I provide downloadable ISO images, will remain based on Slackware -current.

Ideas?

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