lowen
Veteran Member
I'm currently trying out "AV Linux" (based on Debian, with the Xfce desktop UI), and I noticed a couple of problems right away:
Well, that's more than a couple....
* When I first boot up, it offers to connect me to my wireless network, but does not do so automatically, and if I ignore or dismiss that pop-up, I could not find any obvious button or drop-down menu icon (such as the universal "radio waves" symbol) in the task bar to get back to the WiFi settings later....
While I am using AVLinux 5.0.3 (I know 6.0.3 is out.....) for a church to do recording, it doesn't have a network connection, so I can't help you there. Have you asked in the AVLinux forums?
...snip....
On the SD card and the Open File dialog, I haven't had issues, but that's again with the older LXDE-based 5.0.3.
* Double-clicking the control menu does not close a window, and double-clicking the title bar does not maximize or restore a window. Maybe most people don't use these tricks, but I do, and it's annoying to not have them work in a modern PC GUI.
I don't know if XFCE can do that at all, and I've never used those tricks. But you could ask the XFCE developers and see if they would support it.
* Files I saved to the desktop were lost after rebooting. Maybe that's because I was running the "live DVD" version, but I did run it from a bootable SD card, so I assumed that it would be able to retain saved data, or at least warn me upon shutting down or restarting if it wouldn't.
You have to install it to a drive in order to get saving. Even when used as a USB stick or SD or whatever it's set to read-only as long as it's on LIVE media. This is typical behavior from a Live system, and remastersys' created Live media is no exception. I can build a USB stick or other flash media using specific tools that will create the overlay filesystems that some Live media can use, but not with the straight Live media made by remastersys.
As Ole Juul says below your post, AVLinux is a very specialized distribution, hand-tuned and especially made for multimedia content creation. It is not a general-purpose Linux, but it is a great example of just how specialized things can be. There are better general purpose XFCE-base distributions out there; but very few support the easy low-latency audio setup that AVLinux does, when you need that specific type of setup.
As I mentioned, I set up a church with a recording/playback PC using AVLinux 5.0.3. The audio device is an Maudio Delta 1010LT, not your typical sound card. I have Audacity set up to automatically record and play back from two channels on the 1010LT, but the default LXDE playback device is two different channels, and I have the various ins and outs wired to separate channels on the mixing console; if I tried to do this with any other Linux distribution I would be pulling my hair out. But AVLinux just did what I told it to do, and it's been doing that for this church for nearly two years now.
If doing this type of work with XP, AVLinux would be a great replacement. But it's not general purpose.