Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo Linux Professional Audio Workstation

[audiodef]

Admin Edit: Continued from the previous topic. --pjp

EDIT: 5 DEC 2022 BETA TESTERS WANTED

If you've stumbled across this thread, I've been a busy bee with Gentoo Studio lately, and I would love it if anyone tried it out using the installer script to install it.

Now back to the original text of this post...

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Hi everyone,

I wanted to let you all know that I'm thinking of closing my hosted server account with Hetzner, where gentoostudio.org lives. They've been great, and they will be my first stop for such a need, but the recent price increase on existing servers got me thinking about how little I've done over the past three years with all of my projects that use a server. I've been completely immersed in my farmstead and turning it into a working produce farm and small batch lumber operation. I haven't consistently worked on Gentoo Studio, my own music, or a third web site project that has been around for a long time. The price increase pushes it close to $50/month, and with a solar install on my barn coming up, I'd rather put that kind of money toward repaying the solar loan.

I could move to a cheaper server, but... I haven't done all that much on my tech/IT projects. It's really starting to not make sense to spend money on it right now.

I also could set up a Blogspot (or some such) site to host the Gentoo Studio web site at no cost to me, and that's definitely an option I'm considering. But without staying on top of ebuilds and the install tarball, the web site isn't worth all that much.

If anyone would be interested in hosting gentoostudio.org, or even taking it over altogether, that's another idea I would consider. I could then work on it as time permits every now and then in an assistant capacity.

Gentoo Studio is still something that feels important to me. I'm not walking away or abandoning it for good. It just doesn't make sense to continue the expense part of things behind the scenes.

I'm not sure when I'll tell Hetzner I'm cancelling. I need to make a final backup of everything on that server. It could be June or July.

Anyway, that's what I wanted to let everyone know about it. If anyone would like to talk about keeping Gentoo Studio going, you can email me at audiodef at protonmail dot com. I'll get your email well before I see anything here, as my farm doesn't have broadband and I can easily check email on my phone.

I hope you're all doing well.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[xineg]

What are the specs on your site? how much space does it take up on the host?

[audiodef]

[audiodef]

So, here's a follow-up:

Writing my post above forced me to really think about things. I realized I didn't really want to let go of having a dedicated server, so I checked out Hetzner's auction, and to my pleasant surprise, the first thing that came up was a perfectly acceptable server for quite a bit less than the current price I'm paying. So I bought it, and when I checked out, the price went down a few more euros. Score!

I've been migrating stuff from my old server to the new one, and when that's done, I will cancel the old one. So Gentoo Studio will continue in its current form.

I set up the new server with an Ubuntu image provided by Hetzner, because it should make server administration a little easier. This means I'm going to need to learn to set up Catalyst on a non-Gentoo OS, but I don't think this will be a real issue. Catalyst is just a script, really.

So, anyway, some good news as this year's summer approaches.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

Gentoostudio.org is now up on the new server. You wouldn't know this from Adam, but thought I'd just put that here.

I'm hoping to set up a schedule for my tech projects and hopefully work on Gentoo Studio more consistently, even if it's once a week.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[JoeA]

Greetings
Unfortunately, my hard drive crashed with the GentooStudio running. Absolutely, and I don't have a backup of the system. I don't know when I installed it, but it was updated regularly. Now I wanted a new installation and sadly see that there is nothing stage4 on the server that I found on my hard drives unfortunately from 2014. Does anyone have something newer on a stage4 that I can use? I promise I will save the basic system on this regularly as well, not just the data I can provide storage for uploading.
(Sorry for the English, google has to be scolded because I don't even know as much as google )

Thanks so much!

[audiodef]

There isn't a new tarball yet, but I've been building things back up on my new server. It's going to take a little time but it'll get there eventually.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

A brief update: I recently rented a new server on Hetzner's auction. They had a change in their pricing and my current server at the time was going to increase in price quite a bit. So now I have a cheaper one, but still basically the same hardware configuration. While I was at it, I decided to go with their Ubuntu server image instead of using Gentoo as my server OS. I wanted something with simpler, quicker and easier management.

Today I set up a chroot on the server for the purpose of running catalyst to build updated tarballs. Next step is to actually set up catalyst.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

Catalyst up and running, now running through the stage builds.

FYI, I'm looking at making new releases systemd instead of openrc, just to bring it more in line with other Linux distros and make it easier for users more familiar with systemd these days to manage services.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

Now at working out the deets for stage4.spec, with package.use, package.accept_keywords and whatever needs cleaning up for the fscript. It looks like that harfbuzz circular dep is FINALLY gone.

UPDATE: Catalyst is now compiling a stage4. Totally expecting to have to tweak the follow-up fsscript a bit, but once that's sorted, I'll be ready to get into a back-and-forth swing between test installs and tweaking the catalyst scripts until I'm ready to put up a fresh tarball for the public, albeit as a manual install while I work on a new installer script.

UPDATE+: Looks like catalyst has made its first successful tarball. So now I need to do two things, which can be done simultaneously: start working on an autobuild script, and test install that tarball in a vm and see what needs to be tweaked.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

Decided to get a little more serious about a script to automate tarball building: https://gentoostudio.org/?p=573
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

V.1 of an automated catalyst build: https://gentoostudio.org/?p=576

Already working on changes, but it works. It produced a stage4, but I haven't tested it yet.

Also, note that Gentoo Studio is switching to systemd - something I never thought I'd say!
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

It seems a little hard to believe Gentoostudio.org has existed as a domain for ten years, even though it's kind of existed before that as a guide on using Gentoo for audio.

So anyway, I've had COVID this past week despite my best cares. Wife and I were just about to get our latest booster when it hit us both. We're okay, on the tail end now, was just a bad cold for us. Since I was on my butt for a while, I spent much of that time banging away at Gentoo Studio. I seem to have a stable catalyst routine going. (Thank you, #gentoo-releng!) I bashed out a new installer script - in bash, so pun intended. Whipped up a new desktop background for 2023, just for fun.

All the current files involved in putting a working Gentoo Studio system together are up on the Technical Details page, which was sorely due for an update anyway: https://gentoostudio.org/?page_id=174

Here's the desktop background: https://gentoostudio.org/src/GentooStudio2023.png

Feel free to check any/all of it out, test the installer, use the desktop background, make comments, etc.

Just as a fun thing, the list of apps in Gentoo Studio on the front page is now automatically generated. My "buildall" catalyst script, right at the end, spits out a text file that contains only the contents of stage4/packages from stage4.spec. The web server then reads this file and presents it as an HTML table. So all I have to do is... nothing! to update the app list after adding the package to stage4/packages. The descriptions are presented as they are in Portage.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

An update for January 2023:

Hopefully audio-overlay will see the return of an admin somewhere to grant one or two of us the ability to manage PRs. A bunch of stuff is now outdated and fails with EAPI6. It's a great setup - we just need more than one person who can approve PRs.

In the meantime, I've incorporated most of audio-overlay into gentoostudio, along with some PRs that are waiting for approval, just to keep the Gentoo Studio catalyst build from breaking. I hope to be fleshing out the list of installed packages a bit, as well as figuring out how to set Xfce4 defaults when creating a new user, which has changed since I last successfully did that.

Got an idea? Suggestion? Question? Let me know. If I don't have an answer, I'll try to find one.

Hope everyone is off to a good start in 23.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[audiodef]

This is pretty cool... Digit came by on #gentoostudio to say he dropped the tarball into his Bedrock Linux and it worked out. I wish he'd stayed long enough for me to inquire what he mixed it with. But still, very cool.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.

[NeddySeagoon]

audiodef,

You could try filing a bug for audio-overlay access
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[audiodef]

Thanks Neddy. I didn't know I could do that. I'll give it a try.
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Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo-based, professional digital audio workstation OS.