Please review my distro (if you are a musician) | Hacker News Reader

Please review my distro (if you are a musician)

gnuguitarinux.sourceforge.net

41 pointstodoesverso34 comments

You've clearly put a lot of work into this (congrats, by the way), so why not spend a little time making the product site look a little nicer?

My first instinct when I saw the site was "abandoned open source project" and a strong desire to click away. Reading the intro text didn't really tell me what your thing was. Only after looking at screenshots, lists of pre-installed software, the title of this post, and making a few leaps did I understand what you're actually trying to accomplish.

So instead of "mumble-mumble-low-latency-mumble-mumble", how about "[BetterName] - A linux distribution for recording musicians" or similar, followed by a list of benefits to said recording musician.

Here is what an OS website needs to look like:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

Yours doesn't look like that. At all. It looks like every other sourceforge homepage, which means it looks terrible. Get a domain name (for a better product name), spend $400 on a 99designs contest, and spend 20 hours building a nice looking site for your project.

For the effor you've put in thus far, your project deserves it.

I'll do my best to clarify what GNUGuitarINUX is in a few words, Regarding the name, what is wrong with it, is it hard to pronounce? I just wanted to honor the GNU project and the linux project. I would be more than happy if I could come up with a name that has GNU, Linux, Debian and guitar in it :)

Try this: Ask any of the 500 people who have visited your site today to tell you the name of that Linux flavor for Guitar players. I'd be surprised if a single one got it right first try.

Now imagine it was called "Hendrux - a GNU/Linux distro for recording musicians". Pretty much all of us would be able to repeat that back to you (though a few might misspell the name).

Names have value. They send messages. GNUGuitarINUX sends the message that "The author thought this was a good name, so chances are the project itself will be every bit as opaque. Best stay away unless you have a lot of time to spend getting it working."

True, I'll see if HackerNews help me with that ;)

Please change the name, you've obviously put way too much work into it to have it flounder because of it.

I guess I could add a "a.k.a" any suggestion?

Hendrix?

Brilliant!

Seriously, take this.

It's perfect.

Winner!

The estate is very litigious. Maybe try "Hendrux."

Hendrix state suing a random Linux guy would be as absurd as Beatles' Apple Corps suing Apple Computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

That's precisely what I meant.

Nice but will probably attract legal problems, how about Hendrax?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrix_(crater)

So we are calling it Hendrix because it's going to have a massive impact ? :)

"Hendriff" ?

Mandolinux

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandolin

Shreddix?

Linaxe

I play guitar, work on linux servers all day long and have professional knowledge of music software... and I can't understand from your description what this actually does. Is it a plugin, host or controller? Does it require other software to operate? What actual guitar playing related functionality does it have? You might want to add this to the opening sentence or at least the opening paragraph.

Its a live linux distribution, you burn it into a CD or a thumb drive, boot your pc, and plug your guitar. Then you'll be able to use rakarrack which is a realtime effect box. But thanks for the advice, I'll update the opening sentence

That's a lot more helpful. Way better than:

"It has a real-time configured kernel and the whole system configured to obtain the smallest latency possible. Everything is configured (or at least should be) to work out-of-the-box."

... which doesn't mean anything to anybody except you.

Work on that "elevator pitch" description carefully. Get it down to 10 words, then stick it up top in 36 point font so that people stumbling across your thing can figure out what it is.

Well, if you are familiar with other audio distribution out there (ubuntu studio, 64 studio), this mean a lot.

This is a system (obviously a linux one) configured for low latency (save me lots of time and messy config) work out of the box (no other download required to go and play)... say no more, i get it.

But i agree that i was looking for something more elaborated, something which tell me exactly what it use and what it does. Why should i use it over ubuntu studio etc.

OK now I see, Thanks. It looks cool. Now we just need somebody to create a Linux that runs in a stomp box.

More feedback (since I would actually use this if I could figure out how).

How about some instructions on how to install it? I see a download link that gives me an .iso file. And I see this:

Also as live-build (v2.0.3-1) uses squashfs v4.0 it generates an ISO that can be burn into a CD the usual way or it can be dd-ed directly into a thumb drive, which is pretty cool.

... which means nothing. Evidently, it's possible to install it. And it's cool. That doesn't help.

Look. You've spent a lot of time and effort building this thing, but then you just stopped. If you weren't on HN asking for feedback, you'd have lost me a long time ago. But I'm trying my best to actually learn about this thing and try it out, and you simply haven't given me enough information to do so.

Awesome! Now I have another distro to play with (also: AVLinux, http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html) for getting rove (http://github.com/wrl/rove) up and running with my monome (http://monome.org/devices)

Sort of unrelated, but looks like you just gave me a nice big list of Linux audio programs to check out :)

For even more goodness, check out AV Linux.

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

Sir, you get an A in my book just for the effort!

I've been looking for a way to get a small guitar recording studio going at home, and I got so frustrated with Cubase messing with my audio card that I sort of "gave up". Nobody writes low latency drivers for Windows, in fact, they've seem to have given up on real time recording. (Disclaimer: I'm still on Vista)

I will definitely be giving this a try as soon as I get home!

Try Reaper at www.reaper.fm - you can try it free. It's awesome!

How are you meant to pronounce it?

No idea, I speak spanish and its quite easy :) could be something like "new-guitar-inux"?

The GNU is usually pronounced "gah-new" rather than "new".

http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt "But, when it's the name of our system, the correct pronunciation is "guh-NEW" -- pronounce the hard "G". If you talk about the "new" operating system, you'll get people very confused, because we've been working on it for 17 years now, so it is not new any more. [Laughter] But it still is, and always will be, GNU -- no matter how many people call it Linux by mistake. [Laughter]"

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