So I discovered that Guitar Pro 5 “works” with wine (after installing Kubuntu 64 09.04). I say “works” because the MIDI part doesn’t (though there are lots of guides to wrap timidly around wine), but GP5 uses RSE (real sound engine I think), so some of the instruments don’t use MIDI. It’s close enough to practice against. I also got TF2 to “work” but unfortunately won’t be a replacement any time soon....
Wine is the open source Windows emulator program for Linux – A very handy thing to have working well if you ever want to make the transition. I have already determined that when I put together my next desktop which will hopefully be some time next year, I will run Kubuntu (If any of this sounds familiar, I already blogged about it =) Cossover Office is a program put out by Codeweavers that is based on Wine....
I know… Linux distributions and their funky names. But this one is a quality distribution. I had never tried Debian or a Debian-based distribution before, and I have to say I’m impressed. Debian itself is an interesting community. It has three “releases” (stable, testing, unstable). Stable is always incredibly out of date, while unstable takes new updates as they are available. The key to any Linux distribution (IMO) is the packaging method....
KDE ended up taking 30 hours to compile. Which I guess on a 600MHz laptop isn’t that bad. Modern systems should be much better. But the more and more I’ve played with it, the better it is. The Portage system is the way to install software. It is slower, because often you have to compile the software on your machine (but this is better anyway, because then its specifically tailored to your architecture and optomizations)....