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2023-01-16 (Week 2250): Landscapes Shifting
There have been mental shifts in starting the change over to Linux, and their underlying theme is less. Less software and hardware, less project bloat, fewer complications.
The distribution I'm focusing on is antiX 22, which is built from Debian and without systemd. It has brought a 21-year-old laptop (32-bit) back to life and a 12-year-old laptop (64-bit) back to blazing speed. I'm trying to set up everything I need on that 12-year-old laptop, but as I'm a relative newcomer to Linux, there will be a learning curve.
As for what this means for music, I'll need to change up my process. After I release "Frozen in Time" (the album with two thirty-minute tracks I wrote about last week), I'm returning to samples and trackers.
Some Linux trackers look nice, but I want to figure out how to get ModPlug Tracker 1.09.0091 to work. There appear to be two options - either run it in WINE or create a virtual environment for Windows XP/7 and run it through there. Trying to set up a virtual environment sounds like more of a challenge, so I plan to attempt that. If all else fails, I'll try a Linux-based tracker.
The switch to samples and programming seems a little drastic as I came into music through guitar, but I haven't played guitar on an album in over eight years, and the little guitar work I did on the "Links to the Past" demos was an accompaniment to the synths. I took a year of piano lessons before picking up a guitar, so it feels like I'm returning to that.
In some ways, it feels like I've taken an almost 30-year detour, as I'm returning to many of the ideas that held my interest in my adolescent and early teenage years: piano, programming, vintage websites, and clean computing (among other things). I started in DOS, so doing command line work in Linux doesn't feel completely foreign - only something I need to dust off and start using again.
I must sit and see what still sparks interest and what doesn't. I've had a few more meditation sessions since last week's entry, and I've pulled out more info from my subconscious about what works and what doesn't. Building this website and writing a weekly blog work, so I will continue doing that.
There's an idea to go back through all of my old website work since 1996 and integrate it somehow, but I haven't made it that far yet. I need to sit with those old pages and sift through them for more ideas.
Until next week!
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