Page Category: Others

1.0 Introduction

Solus is one of that fairly rare breed in the Linux distro world: an independently-developed distro, rather than being yet another build atop of Ubuntu, Debian or Arch. That's certainly novel, but it also means the distro is reliant on a small band of developers who might at any time up-sticks and do a bit of throwing-in of towels. It's been known to happen!

It is a semi-rolling release distro, too, which means its software collection is kept pretty much bang up-to-date, with fresh software updates taking place weekly. Various downloads for it are available, with the main difference between them being the choice of desktop manager: all the usual suspects are available, such as Gnome, KDE (Plasma), MATE and XFCE. The most distinctive option, however, and Solus' so-called "flagship distribution" is the one that uses the Budgie desktop -and that's the one I've chosen to install for the purposes of this documentation. It's very attractive and intuitive, though a little Fischer-Price-y for my tastes! [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Fedora is something of a workhorse distro, being in the same robustness and reliability stakes as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, whilst simultaneously being generally considered pretty cutting-edge, with two releases a year and thus access to very up-to-date packages. When Linus Torvalds himself uses your distro, you can be fairly sure you're doing something right, anyway! The distro comes in various formats: Workstation and Server are the two obvious ones; there are three others of more esoteric appeal. This documentation relates only to running Giocoso on the Workstation distro. That ships with a Gnome desktop, which I can't personally stand -and that's why I don't use it as my daily driver. However, other desktop environments can be installed and retrofitted to it post-install... but I haven't done that here, choosing to stick with the default environment. Ultimately, though, Giocoso doesn't care whether you're using Gnome, KDE or something whackier and niche: it's the underlying OS's selection of packages that matter, not the desktop manager.

Right in the middle of development work for Giocoso Version 2, a new release of Fedora Workstation (version 36) dropped, and I therefore switched to that newer version of Fedora for the purposes of writing these bits of documentation. However: Giocoso Version 2 runs perfectly well on Fedora 35, too. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

The Raspberry Pi single board computer is a remarkable piece of computing technology: about the size of a 2.5" solid state hard disk, the Pi 4B I'm using manages to pack in an ARM processor, 4GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet, twin USB 3 ports, twin USB 2 ports and twin HDMI outputs. It has, in short, everything required to be a capable (if slightly slow) home PC... for about £55. (That's the usual list price when the midget computers are actually in stock: they are currently in short supply worldwide right now, so prices have sky-rocketed to £150+, which makes them much less desirable as daily driver PCs). I think that's a good deal (when you can get it!) and what the Pi perhaps lacks in raw speed and CPU power, it greatly makes up for by running entirely silently: whilst you can certainly fit fans to keep things cool, a good case can keep the temperatures down entirely passively. In a music room, silence is definitely golden!

By design and default, a modern Raspberry Pi is generally kitted out with 'Raspbian' or 'Raspberry Pi OS', which is an ARM-specific port of Debian, packaged with an allegedly user-friendly front-end that makes Fisher-Price look advanced. I am not a fan of it, put it that way! On the other hand, it is lightweight enough to make the Pi feel quite 'snappy'. That maybe because it uses the LXDE desktop environment by default, rather than a heavyweight, 'conventional' desktop such as KDE. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

The Raspberry Pi single board computer is a remarkable piece of computing technology: about the size of a 2.5" solid state hard disk, the Pi 4B I'm using manages to pack in an ARM processor, 4GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet, twin USB 3 ports, twin USB 2 ports and twin HDMI outputs. It has, in short, everything required to be a capable (if slightly slow) home PC... for about £55. (That's the usual list price when the midget computers are actually in stock: they are currently in short supply worldwide right now, so prices have sky-rocketed to £150+, which makes them much less desirable as daily driver PCs). I think that's a good deal (when you can get it!) and what the Pi perhaps lacks in raw speed and CPU power, it greatly makes up for by running entirely silently: whilst you can certainly fit fans to keep things cool, a good case can keep the temperatures down entirely passively. In a music room, silence is definitely golden!

By design and default, a modern Raspberry Pi is generally kitted out with 'Raspbian' or 'Raspberry Pi OS', which is an ARM-specific port of Debian, packaged with an allegedly user-friendly front-end that makes Fisher-Price look advanced. I am not a fan of it, put it that way! Fortunately, you can install 'proper' Linux distros on it instead, including Ubuntu, Fedora or, making me even more happy, Manjaro. It's this distro I'll documented here. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

I find myself in a bit of a dilemma as far as running Giocoso on Windows 11, because I lack any hardware that is capable of running it in a supported fashion... yet, I do run it on a vintage 2012 spare laptop and Giocoso runs on it perfectly well. In fact, it is much easier to get it running on Windows 11 than it is on Windows 10, thanks to improvements in Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux on that platform.

It remains, however, a problem to offer support for doing something on a platform that remains, for me, technically unsupported! Therefore, I won't: if you want to run Giocoso on Windows 11, I'll give you instructions which have worked for me, but I cannot vouch for them in the long-run and I won't offer support for it. You're on your own, basically! Of course, if you are a well-off classical music enthusiast who loves using Windows and wants to donate Windows 11-supported hardware on which I can continue to develop Giocoso for Windows 11 in a properly supported manner, do please get in touch! [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso has been tested to work on a physical Sierra Mac Mini, a physical Catalina iMac, the same iMac with Monterey installed and a Big Sur installation on a VirtualBox. I am therefore pretty confident that Giocoso will run on any version of macOS (i.e., from 10.12 [Sierra] upwards), though I haven't tested every single one of them and I have no idea what will happen with anything Apple releases later in 2022. However, anything which claims to be macOS and isn't one of the versions I've just listed has not actually been tested and I do not have the physical resources required to provide support on those macOS versions (unless you'd like to donate hardware that's capable of running those other versions: please get in touch if you do!) For similar reasons, I cannot say whether Giocoso will run on M1 Macs: I've only ever used Intel chips.

Giocoso has several package dependencies -that is, programs which must also exist on your Apple computer for it to be able to work. The simplest way of ensuring all those dependencies are installed correctly is to install them with a package manager called 'MacPorts'. Once MacPorts exists, installing almost any other piece of software is just a matter of issuing an appropriate 'port install... ' command. [...] 

Here are the instructions on getting Giocoso running on Windows 10, distilled into their most concise form. All you get are the instructions on what to type and what to do: no screenshots, no explanations -and if there's a sequence of actions that happen as a result of typing in something, you're supposed to know how to work through those by yourself! Note that the instructions are specific to Windows 10, because you do not need to install separate X or PulseAudio servers on Windows 11. Giocoso-on-Windows-11 therefore has its own installation guide entirely.

If you want or need the long-form version that does take the time to describe things carefully, step-by-step and with pictures and explanations, click here. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Running Giocoso on Windows is not exactly difficult, but it's not trivially to document either! The basic premise is that Giocoso is a Bash script and so Windows needs to be able to run Bash scripts for it to work on that platform. There are various ways that can be arranged, but in these days of Windows 10 and 11, the simplest is probably to install and run the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Version 2 -or 'WSL2' for short.

WSL2 is a fairly transparent way to run a real Linux distro 'within' Windows -and, in its most recent incarnations, it's fairly easy to get Linux programs that output audio and graphics to 'pipe them' onto the Windows desktop and audio hardware. All that needs to be present on Windows for that to happen is an X server and a Pulseaudio Server. [...]