The AGNULA/DeMuDi distribution: GNU/Linux and Free Software for the pro audio and sound research domain

AGNULA (acronym for “A GNU/Linux Audio distribution”, pronounced with a strong g) is the name of a project which has been funded until April 2004 by the European Commission (number of contract: IST-2001-34879; key action IV.3.3, Free Software: towards the critical mass). After the end of the funded period, AGNULA is continuing as an international, mixed volunteer/funded project, aiming to spread Free Software in the professional audio/video arena. The AGNULA team is working on a tool to reach this goal: AGNULA/DeMuDi, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian, entirely composed of Free Software, dedicated to professional audio research and work. This paper describes the current status of AGNULA/DeMuDi and how the AGNULA team envisions future work in this area. 1 The AGNULA project a bit of history In 1998 the situation of sound/music Free Software applications had already reached what could be considered well beyond initial pioneeristic stage. A website, maintained by musician and GNU/Linux1 enthusiast Dave Phillips, was already collecting all possible sound and music software running on GNU/Linux architectures. At that time, the biggest problem was that all these applications were dispersed over the Internet: there was no common operational framework and each and every application was a case-study by itself. A natural development followed shortly after, when musician/composer/programmer Marco Trevisani proposed a to a small group of friends (Nicola Bernardini, Maurizio De Cecco, Davide Rocchesso and Roberto Bresin) to create LAOS (the acronym of Linux Audio Open Sourcing), a binary distribution of all essential sound/music tools available at the time including website diffusion and support. LAOS came up too early, and it did not go very far. But in 2000, when Marco Trevisani proposed (this time to Nicola Bernardini, Günter Geiger, Dave Phillips and Maurizio De Cecco) to build DeMuDi (Debian Multimedia Distribution) an unofficial Debian-based binary distribution of sound/music Free Software, times were riper. Nicola Bernardini organized a workshop in Firenze, Italy at the beginning of June 2001, inviting an ever–growing group of supporters and contributors (including: Marco Trevisani, Günter Geiger, Dave Phillips, Paul Davis, François Déchelle, Georg Greve, Stanko Juzbasic, Giampiero Salvi, Maurizio Umberto Puxeddu and Gabriel Maldonado). That was the occasion to start the first concrete DeMuDi distribution, the venerable 0.0 alpha which was then quickly assembled by Günter Geiger with help from Marco Trevisani. A bootable CD-version was then burned just in time for the ICMC 2001 held in La Habana, Cuba, where Günter Geiger and Nicola Bernardini held a tutorial workshop showing features, uses and advantages of DeMuDi[1]. On November 26, 2001 the European Commission awarded the AGNULA Consortium — composed by the Centro Tempo Reale, IRCAM, the IUA-MTG at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Free Software Foundation Europe, KTH and Red Hat France — with consistent funding for an accompanying measure lasting 24 months (IST-2001-34879). This accompanying measure, which was terminated on March 31st 2004, gave considerable thrust to the AGNULA/DeMuDi project providing scientific applications previously unreleased in binary form and the possibility to pay professional personnel to work on the distribution. 1Throughout the document, the term GNU/Linux will be used when referring to a whole operating system using Linux as its base kernel, and Linux when referring to the kernel alone.