Comp 3000 ArtistX Report

Background

     ArtistX is a free distribution whose aim is to "turn a common computer into a full multimedia production studio"<ref>http://www.artistx.org/site3/ ArtistX homepage</ref>. The current version (at the time of writing) is based on the latest Ubuntu release 'Natty 11.04'. With multimedia developers in mind, its distinguishing feature is that it "includes almost all of the free multimedia software available for the GNU/Linux platform" so that someone who regularly uses graphics or audio development tools is ready to start right out of the box (see 1). The easiest way to download it is to go to the Download section of their website but be prepared to receive a big file; the .iso file is 3.6GB. If the size deters you at all keep in mind that there are (according to their site) over 2500 packages of free multimedia software that have to be able to run on a live DVD.

     ArtistX seems to have undergone a couple of name changes since its inception by the Opensourcelab team from the Open Source Laboratory of Virtual Reality and Multi Media Park as we see from the earliest news releases on distrowatch<ref>http://distrowatch.com/index.php?distribution=artistx ArtistX distrowatch news releases</ref>. Developed in Turin, Italy, Medialinux (which then became Mediainlinux) was based on Knoppix (with a couple of releases being based on Debian instead). The last release to use the name Mediainlinux was released in 2005 (this release was also the last to be based on Knoppix). It wasn't until 2007 that another release appeared, this time sporting the current name of ArtistX. The first few releases were based on Debian but since 2009 every release has been based on Ubuntu.

     Considering the type of company who originally developed this distribution it's easy to speculate why they decided to make it. If you were the head of a multimedia company, wouldn't you want to have your developers working with high quality software? Wouldn't it be great if that software was free and readily available?

  Currently it is unclear what company develops this distribution due to the following:

• the website has no 'about' section;
• there are no links to companies found on the website;
• the 'Copyleft' at the bottom of the ArtistX page reads "Copyleft © 2011. ArtistX - Audio Graphic Video Multimedia Linux" which, along with the 'Donation' button on the page, may indicate it having branched off into an independent company now;
• the person associated with the company through the distrowatch news releases (see 2) is a man named Marco Ghirlanda, who lists Project Manager and Team Leader at ArtistX as his current profession on his linkedIn profile which also hints at an independent company now;
• looking at Mr. Ghirlanda's work history we see that he worked at Virtual Reality and Multi Media Park until February 2006 which is about the time when he started his job at ArtistX (January 2006) which seems to indicate that ArtistX branched off into a child company;
• further evidence that development of this product branched into its own company is that its predecessor in the distrowatch news release is Mediainlinux (see 2);
• branching off would explain the lapse between the last Mediainlinux release and the first ArtistX release.

Faced with this information one would tend to speculate that ArtistX is its own company that develops itself and is probably a child company of Virtual Reality and Multi Media Park. There is a small piece of evidence against this conclusion however and that is the lack of any link to each other or mention of each other on their webpages.

Installation/Startup

     For reasons of convenience I decided to install and test this operating system (OS) in a virtual machine (VM). Specifically, the setup was run from Oracle's VirtualBox version 4.1.2 from one of the computers in one of Carleton University 's many labs. The machine ran Windows 7 Enterprise with about 4 GB of RAM (although the VM only got 1419 MB) and an external drive from which to allocate the 20 GB disk size I gave the VM. If you're wondering why I would give this VM 20 GB it's because the ArtistX website documentation recommends 512 MB RAM and 20 GB disk space for installation. As for the number of processors, I left it at the default of 1. Hardware virtualization was enabled, specifically "Enable VT-x/AMD-V" and "Enable Nested Paging".

     The installation process went fairly smooth with few hiccups. Once the VM was setup and the iso was loaded it presented a few options to select from. One small annoyance was that although I selected the 'install' option it seems to have ignored it and run from the live DVD anyway. It took about two to three minutes to boot up after which I ran the install executable on the desktop. The installation was straightforward and didn't require much user interaction, probably the same amount as Ubuntu requires; it asks for your language, asks you whether it should use the whole hard drive or partition it, asks you which drive to use, asks you where you are and finally asks you to create a user account. From there it does all of the work.

     For me this whole process took just shy of an hour. I can only guess why it took so long but I'm sure the following affected it negatively: I enabled the boxes that asked if it should download updates from the web as it goes and then install some third party software; I was running other applications in Windows (namely a few instances of paint, Firefox and Microsoft Office Word); the VM had only one processor to work with; the amount of RAM wasn't very high; the university's internet probably wasn't very fast, as is often the case; the OS was being installed on an external hard drive attached via universal serial bus (USB).

     After installation succeeded it asked me to restart the machine, so I did. I found it odd that when it starts back up it asks to choose between the Ubuntu OS, Ubuntu in recovery mode, two memory tests and sometimes another option of 'Previous Linuxes'. I told it to boot the regular Ubuntu. It seems to have been the right choice since ArtistX loaded normally after that. Another oddity though is that after I logged in as the user for the first time it gave me an warning message saying the hardware couldn't run a program (Unity) and told me to choose 'Ubuntu classic' at the login screen. I closed the message box and it continued fine to the desktop. Unfortunately the initial installation didn't install all of the updates. I was then presented with the option to update Ubuntu (which I declined) and to update, install and remove a bunch of random packages (although it told me it couldn't install all of them due to some error or other so it would do a partial install). This round of updates took a little more than an hour and another restart to complete and left my machine looking more like Ubuntu than it had initially. Finally, I installed the guest additions which thankfully took only a couple of minutes to install.

References

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