After trying dyne:bolic and pure:dyne, I reverted to my last resort:  Ubuntu Studio (Intrepid Ibex version).

It isn’t that I dislike Ubuntu.  I’ve had it installed on my laptop and on our family computer for years.  I’ve also recommended it to friends several times with great success.  There were, however, two reasons why I wanted to avoid it for my multimedia workstations:

  1. Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop, which, although it is great, needs more system resources than, for instance, Xfce.  I wanted to leave as much CPU and memory as possible for Cinelerra.
  2. Ubuntu Studio comes pre-configured with loads of good multimedia applications, but Cinelerra itself isn’t one of them.

It turns out that I needn’t have worried on either score.  Installing Cinelerra turned out to be painless.  I used the community version (see Cinelerra :: a video editor and compositor for Linux for information on adding the repository to apt and installing the package).  Further tips for installing Cinelerra on UbuStu can be found here.

Once I had Cinelerra installed, it seemed to be working, but I still needed to do some tweaking of Cinelerra’s own settings to make it usable.  I’ll cover that in another post.

Beyond that, UbuStu worked like a charm without any performance issues on my aging hardware.  I’m also really enjoying the artwork and styling of the default UbuStu desktop.  Very snazzy.