Gentoo Studio

Gentoo Studio is an actively maintained, source-based, 64-bit desktop real-time Linux audio production system based on Gentoo Linux. It is designed to allow users to have a broad range of audio applications out-of-the-box, and to allow a high level of customization not generally available to other Linux audio distributions – or to Windows or Mac, for that matter. An advantage of having Gentoo as the base for this distro is its package manager, Portage, which has a system of enabling/disabling compile-time options for applications. This means application binaries can be tailored to the user’s computer hardware and the user’s needs. This in turn means more efficient use of the computer’s resources, which is always helpful to running real-time audio applications.

While Gentoo Studio is not a commercial product – it is free – it is absolutely intended to be a full-fledged, professional audio production system for musicians, composers, audio engineers, computer music programmers, and anyone else needing an audio production system.

There is a sticky in the Multimedia section of forums.gentoo.org. (FGO.) Please post there if you need help or have any questions.

Before beginning an install, please make sure you are using a machine that does not contain any data you wish to keep, and that meets the following criteria:

• 64-bit architecture. 32-bit installs are not supported by Gentoo Studio.
• A modern, multi-core processor.
• High-capacity hard disks with a rotation speed of at least 7200 RPM and/or solid-state drives.
• As much RAM as you can manage.