Breaking The Surface

[NothingAgainst]

Just watched the new trailer for PASSENGERS were Jennifer Lawrence is trapped by a pool of water as it looses gravity. Well that is a lot like my exit from Windows 8.1, but the struggle is over and i can finally breath the fresh minty air of linux. Windows ends its days stuck forever in 100% disk usage so I needed a way to escape on my phone, i found a nice app called DroidDrive in which i was able to mimic an install disk and now here I am. Thankyou so much to all the developers and community who made it such an easy transition.

Being poor and somewhat ethical I am already familiar with some windows ports of linux programs like gimp. I was happy when i saw how quickly gimp loads at home and look forward to seeing blender in action one day soon.

There are a couple of things i am worried about, well they both relate to screwing up my system. The first is I have a 8gb sd card that I want to use in the event of system failure so I need some kind of rescue disc information. The other is that I want a good music creation suit. I have Ardour4 and have done a quick 'testing testing' on the mic and it looks good. I have also been looking into KX studio but the posts about it seem quite old. I like to record live instruments and voice but also mess around with industrial and dubstep so am looking for advice in this regard,also things i should be careful about so i don't break the system.

Linux Mint 1.8 Cinnamon Laptop

Thankyou

[Crewp]

Welcome to Linux Mint, and the Mint forum. I am sure there are member's here who can answer your questions. I do not use the type of software you described. But, as far as backup goes, I have everything backed up on another drive, so in case I break my system beyond fixing, it is just a quick reload away.

[kc1di]

Hello NothingAgainst and Welcome to the Linux Mint Family,
Good to have your here and hope you enjoy your time.
Learn all you can.
I'm not much of an audio person so can't give much advice but Audacity has come in handy for me at times.
it's in the software center.

Good Luck and enjoy!

[The-Wizard]

Welcome to the Mint family forums.

Most problems already have a fix
search
read
ask

if you need to ask please copy and paste the result of terminal code inxi -Fnx with your question

And take your time to avoid disappointment.

wizard

[Moem]

Hello! Glad that you found us, you have definitely washed up on the right shore. Welcome!

[jimallyn]

Welcome aboard, NothingAgainst! It is generally best to post requests for information in the appropriate forums section rather than in Introduce yourself. No rule against it or anything (that I know of), it's just more likely to get looked at when it in the right place. I have looked at Ardour, but haven't recently needed anything as complex as that, so I mostly use Audacity. One of the best ways to break your system is to install software from places other than the Mint/Ubuntu repositories. There are also PPAs that you can install from, and you might want to ask on the forums before installing any of those. (That said, I have a mess of them installed, no problems so far.) And when you go to install or uninstall software, you will be shown a list of what all will be done. Read it! If it says it wants to uninstall a bunch of stuff, don't do it!

[sikejsudjek]

Welcome to the forums

For backup you can run clonezilla (free) from a cd or usb - this is a disk cloning utility that will clone the drive or partition. Unfortunately it doesn't do incremental backups, but for a complete disaster recovery its very reliable (and I can use it on dual boot systems)

I also use systemback (installed from their ppa) which allows me to set restore points and create a 'live' usb copy of the system I can boot from if for some reason I screw something up. The restore points work well and are easy to use.
(Systemback has one problem on mint - you have to remove casper and install live-boot in the synaptic package manager to get the live usb or dvd to boot without hanging. Hopefully this'll get fixed but I've tested this workaround and it seems ok. No need to do this if all you want is system restore).

There are lots of other backup solutions and each person's preferences are different.

Depending on what you are doing audacity is good for single track recording. Reaper DAW also runs well under wine (with a bit of extra latency). Keep an eye out for a native linux build which may be forthcoming sometime soon as they're testing an alpha. Ardour is the best native linux solution for now.

[NothingAgainst]

Thankyou everyone for your kind welcome and information