Hi guys,
I have an old sony vaio laptop with only 512 Mb of RAM and I'm looking for a light linux distro that supports pd-extended and the low-latency kernel.

Now I'm using Xubuntu HH and pd works pretty fine but just pd&gem 'cause there's neither pd-extended nor the low-latency kernel in the synaptic repos and the terminal installation (sudo apt-get install) doesn't work for both of them (pd-extended for ubuntu HH installs but doesn't start).

I want to install the OS on the machine so no puredyne and live distros. I can install from CD only because the CD-DVD player, for some unknown reason, doesn't start any bootable DVD... just CD.

So, can you, please, give me suggestions?
Thank you very much.

answering myself... i've found a solution,
it's lubuntu, lighter than xubuntu. I did succeed to install pd-extended and the realtime jackd...
just in case anybody else needs a light linux distro for pd

I'm pretty sure PureDyne can be installed to the HDD...?

BTW, not that I need any new packages, but I'm a little worried, since the last PureDyne release was exactly a year ago.... Does anyone know their release strategy, is this normal?

Yes puredyne can be installed. I did it and tried it but had problems with [gemwin] and some other audio apps didn't work.
Now I'm testing Lubuntu 10.10 and, as I said, pd-extended works fine, the OS is nice, you can install all the audio and video puredyne apps as well and the upgrades are the ones of the ubuntu distro.
cheers

And there's always Gentoo! The minimal install disc image is something around 180mb which is perfect to throw on a usb drive and boot my netbook from. Installation is completely customizable.

@murray said:

And there's always Gentoo! The minimal install disc image is something around 180mb which is perfect to throw on a usb drive and boot my netbook from. Installation is completely customizable.

like!

hello, old topic, i know but i have a question

which versions of lubuntu and pd extended were used?

i was going to install xubuntu and pd extended on my laptop, but if the jack rt doesnt work, i might as well try lubuntu.

I am using the latests version of lubuntu on my acer aspire one and pd extended works well.

Hello everybody:
As far as I know, all <~>buntus (meaning ~ a U, an L an X, whatever) and debian use the "aptitude" package installer. You should check if pd-extended or pure-data is among the tree of packages for your distribution.
To do so, open a terminal window and type:

$ aptitude search pd-extended
or
$ aptitude search pure-data

Then something like this should appear:

p pd-extended - Pure Data with patches and a large collection of externals

The 'p' means that is not installed yet. You should type then:

$ sudo aptitude install pd-extended
(Type your superuser -root- password when prompted)

Or

$ sudo su
(or just "su" in debian) Type your superuser password when prompted, then the $ changes to #, meaning you are superuser:
# aptitude install pd-extended

You may have to install some other packages on the fly, but you should be asked for it, to type Y or N. If you type "aptitude search" after installing, the 'p' letter at the left should have changed to 'i'.

If pd-extended is not available in your distribution package tree, then is recommended to install it from:

http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended

As always, I wish you success!

Sumidero

I've used Puppy Linux for many years with a slackware build.

http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20Latest%20Release.htm
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.1/audio/Pd-extended/

It'll boot from USB,SD,CD,DVD,HDD and is only 130MB or less depending on what you go for. It runs on all kinds of ancient things and is relatively easy to pare down to something <half the size if needs be.