Updated AV Linux Utilities

[korakios]

Hi Glen , it's nice seeing that the cpu governor utility got polished , although I saw "cpupower-gui" utility @sunrat suggested and it looks great :)
I don't use AVLinux anymore but it's the main reason I switched permanently to Linux !
I tried to run the latest live ISO but got some trouble . Since I mainly wanted to check the pipewire utilities there is no reason for troubleshooting .
I mainly wanted to suggest (and help if I can)
- a button for stopping pipewire creating the "annoying" monitoring playback devices for every input . It should help keeping qpwgraph cleaner (although I saw the latest version of qpwgraph has filtering options )

- An option to adjust resampling quality .If someone uses multiple audiocards (onboard. usb mic , webcam etc) for multimedia , lowering the resampling quality might help weak cpus .

[erikjms]

. . . I also have to start wondering if my tiny part in all of this is now over. I don't really need it for my ego... ego about what? I've essentially stood on the shoulders of giants and made several Linux mix-tapes...lol. I will say that harsh criticisms and entitled behaviors don't wound me to the core but I wonder if all of the stolen time to keep this going would not be better spent in a new direction. It is obvious something is afoot and times have changed as they always will.
back to anything beyond this? For me if Reddit or Discord were the only games in town it would definitely tamp down my level of engagement..

I hope you don't give up on AV Linux, even if it is for mostly selfish reasons: I'm checking it out again after using it around 2015-2018 after doing what I could to use Manjaro for audio production. It's fine for that, or would be if I were also still young enough to want to spend as much time in config files as in synth patches, but it has become wearing to try to keep a rolling-release distro updated. Even a curated one, where updates rarely break anything: it's still an afternoon to read the update thread, backup the system, and download and install the packages, when I could have been using my limited energy to make music.

For what it is worth, the biggest change that I perceive is in how people use social media for tech support now. I see AV Linux mentioned quite often on the two Discord servers I frequent that are dedicated--mostly--to digital audio. Unfa's Discord especially: it has become the de facto "Linux audio help server", and anyone who asks about good distros for audio production will receive, overwhelmingly, two answers: AV LInux and Ubuntu Studio (or whatever Ubuntu's media spin is called now... I pay less than no attention to them).

Your life is your life, of course, but this other old Gen-X'er really hopes you don't give up on AV Linux. I don't know what your downloads are like, but my experience tells me that forums are just not as popular as more immediate, chat-like platforms.

You know, like IRC. :) The irony is not lost on me.

Myself, I'm fine with checking a few Discord servers, but I do miss the long form conversations of the old internet. If your distaste for Discord is not set in stone, you'd probably get a fair amount of engagement on Unfa's server, if that sort of thing helps keep you going. It's not as full of entitled users as some other Linux or Linux-adjacent platforms; quite a few devs hang out there as well and they don't put up with that any more than they used to, although many are a little more polite about it now than they might have once been.

I'll have to weigh in on the new utilities later. I'm still trying not to lose too much time and energy finding a place to install AV Linux. Buy another drive or rearrange all my data? This is not an easy decision!

Erik

[sunrat]

Maybe not directly relevant but I said I'd test it one day, finally got round to trying avl-mxe-pipewire-tools. My only Pipewire setup is Testing (Trixie) atm however. First had to install yad from sid as it's not currently in testing, but install went fine after that. Was able to change quantum and sample rate, show Wireplumber status, and view PW system info. But the Processes monitor failed to start; I resume that's just pw-top? pw-top works fine in terminal.

[AVLinux]

Maybe not directly relevant but I said I'd test it one day, finally got round to trying avl-mxe-pipewire-tools. My only Pipewire setup is Testing (Trixie) atm however. First had to install yad from sid as it's not currently in testing, but install went fine after that. Was able to change quantum and sample rate, show Wireplumber status, and view PW system info. But the Processes monitor failed to start; I resume that's just pw-top? pw-top works fine in terminal.

Hi sunrat!

Thanks for checking them out, I appreciate your time!

I think the pw-top issue is that in my tools it specifically uses the Enlightenment 'terminology' terminal because it has some display features I really like and I don't think I made that a dependency so when you launch from the menu it doesn't find terminology and then fails. I'll have to consider what the best thing is to handle that, I don't want to get into maintaining multiple versions of these utilities.

[AVLinux]

@erikjms

Thanks for your comments! I've moved on to some other projects for a few months and will see what the tea leaves say when I get back to actively working on AVL, I will always be working on an installable and deployable ISO version for myself because between my son and I we have several production machines and I always work on making it ready to potentially share beyond that. I'll have to weigh out at that time whether continuing wider distribution or expanding into customized MX XFCE4 and Plasma ISO's are worth the 'signal to noise' ratio.

[AVLinux]

Hi Glen , it's nice seeing that the cpu governor utility got polished , although I saw "cpupower-gui" utility @sunrat suggested and it looks great :)
I don't use AVLinux anymore but it's the main reason I switched permanently to Linux !
I tried to run the latest live ISO but got some trouble . Since I mainly wanted to check the pipewire utilities there is no reason for troubleshooting .
I mainly wanted to suggest (and help if I can)
- a button for stopping pipewire creating the "annoying" monitoring playback devices for every input . It should help keeping qpwgraph cleaner (although I saw the latest version of qpwgraph has filtering options )

- An option to adjust resampling quality .If someone uses multiple audiocards (onboard. usb mic , webcam etc) for multimedia , lowering the resampling quality might help weak cpus .

Hi there, nice to hear from you!

I'm curious about the 'trouble' you ran into on the ISO unless by trouble you mean 'Enlightenment'?...lol(notlol)

It's hard to say how far to go with PipeWire utilities, at this point I'm just thinking to make general things more visible to the User, most Distros have no visible PipeWire tools so what we have already + qpwgraph is a big step. If people want to get into resampling for different Audio devices and stuff like that they probably are better off with the PipeWire documentation, it will be a tiny use-case. Another factor is a lot of people who are doing Pro-level recording are not using any Desktop Audio servers and simply using the DAW ALSA backends (I do this all the time) I haven't personally used JACK, Pulse or PipeWire to record for many years so it's generally annoying to have to tweak this stuff into a Pro Audio context when it isn't necessarily the best option..

[korakios]

Hi Glen , it's nice seeing that the cpu governor utility got polished , although I saw "cpupower-gui" utility @sunrat suggested and it looks great :)
I don't use AVLinux anymore but it's the main reason I switched permanently to Linux !
I tried to run the latest live ISO but got some trouble . Since I mainly wanted to check the pipewire utilities there is no reason for troubleshooting .
I mainly wanted to suggest (and help if I can)
- a button for stopping pipewire creating the "annoying" monitoring playback devices for every input . It should help keeping qpwgraph cleaner (although I saw the latest version of qpwgraph has filtering options )

- An option to adjust resampling quality .If someone uses multiple audiocards (onboard. usb mic , webcam etc) for multimedia , lowering the resampling quality might help weak cpus .

Hi there, nice to hear from you!

I'm curious about the 'trouble' you ran into on the ISO unless by trouble you mean 'Enlightenment'?...lol(notlol)

It's hard to say how far to go with PipeWire utilities, at this point I'm just thinking to make general things more visible to the User, most Distros have no visible PipeWire tools so what we have already + qpwgraph is a big step. If people want to get into resampling for different Audio devices and stuff like that they probably are better off with the PipeWire documentation, it will be a tiny use-case. Another factor is a lot of people who are doing Pro-level recording are not using any Desktop Audio servers and simply using the DAW ALSA backends (I do this all the time) I haven't personally used JACK, Pulse or PipeWire to record for many years so it's generally annoying to have to tweak this stuff into a Pro Audio context when it isn't necessarily the best option..

I'll open a new topic for troubleshooting , Enlightenment (I was a bit surprised you moved away from xfce ) ,isn't an issue since I can't even login
As for the Desktop Audio servers, I agree that ALSA is the most common usage since most people on audio production have a dedicated soundcard .Tweaking pipewire is nightmare , it's so modular that you have to look in scattered different places for a single feature. It took me a whole day tofind a way to disable the monitoring devices ...

PS I found another utility for Pipewire (if needed for AVL or MX in general)
https://github.com/magillos/Cable

[AVLinux]

I'll open a new topic for troubleshooting , Enlightenment (I was a bit surprised you moved away from xfce ) ,isn't an issue since I can't even login
As for the Desktop Audio servers, I agree that ALSA is the most common usage since most people on audio production have a dedicated soundcard .Tweaking pipewire is nightmare , it's so modular that you have to look in scattered different places for a single feature. It took me a whole day tofind a way to disable the monitoring devices ...

Agree, I'm no fan of PipeWire at all, I just had to acknowledge it was happening and try to work with it..

There were a lot of problems with latest AVL and Login because lightDM would appear as fully dimmed and not visible when booting with sysvinit but booting with systemd fixes this and since Enlightenment is developed with systemd in mind future AVL ISO's will boot (and install) to systemd, this is already working in development. It is very odd that you experienced this with Live ISO boot though, the issue I mentioned was for people who installed AVL, not running live. The Live ISO should simply load to Desktop and autologin but it does take several seconds for the Desktop to set up it's config and appear.

[Aceediq]

@AVLinux this might be off topic but I have an enquiry

I have the AVL 23.1 version on a USB, would it be okay to install that version and update my way to AVL 23.2 and the latest packages?


edit:
I previously used a Sony VAIO vpcs123fg and the AVL 23.1 iso worked fine preinstallation, post installation and everything in between

now I laid my hands on a HP elite book 8460p and it doesn't boot live after selecting the AVL option in the grub menu...maybe it will still boot completely but I couldn't wait due to battery running low, I will try again when connected to a power source...

[seriousness]

As @AVLinux wrote, there were a few issues with the 23.1 ISO.

If you don't want to deal with these, install the 23.2 ISO.