I’m trying to create a static build of Audacity 1.2.6 so that I can run it on a recent version of Ubuntu. I’ve been able to successfully build Audacity 1.2.6 by compiling it on Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 running inside of a virtual machine. However, I’ve checked the output of ./configure --help, and I can’t find any options referring to static compilation. I think that in recent Audacity versions, one can use ./configure --enable-static to perform a static build, but I’m not sure whether this would also work on Audacity 1.2.6.
I’d appreciate any guidance anyone can offer as to how I can accomplish this. Thanks,
I would not recommend Audacity 1.2.6 for running on Linux. I don’t think it ever worked very well, and I’ve had little success with it. If you really need to run Audacity 1.2.6 on Linux it would probably work much better (and more easily) to run the Windows build in WINE. Otherwise I’d highly recommend using Audacity 1.3.12 (which is included in the Ubuntu repository).
Thanks for the tip, I will definitely back off of that course of action.
The reason I was trying to use Audacity 1.2.6 is that Audacity 1.3.12 in the Ubuntu repositories has been extremely unstable on my hardware, frequently crashing, and possibly causing the desktop to freeze. I should point out that my hardware is terrible - it uses an ATI onboard graphics card which is no longer supported by the proprietary driver, and the open source radeon driver has generally been buggy, so it’s possible that this has been the cause of Audacity’s instability. However, I’d like to confirm this before investing in a new graphics card. Could you tell me, what would be be the best way to diagnose this problem? I am an advanced user, and so if I need to compile a debug build and run it in gdb, I can do that. If there’s an easier way to do this, though, I’m open to that too.
Audacity is a bit like the miner’s canary. I’m running Ubuntu 10.10 on this laptop and it’s rock solid (Intel processor and graphics) and the default Ubuntu build of Audacity 1.3.12 is extremely reliable (though still a couple of known bugs), but it’s quite a common complaint that if the system is a bit ropey, Audacity will show that up immediately.
As you’re an advanced Linux user, you’re probably ahead of me, so I’ll see if I can find someone that’s a bit more experienced with Linux if they can have look here.
Before we start, are there any particular things that make Audacity crash, or is it just generally unstable?
Which version of Ubuntu are you using?
Do you have the default ALSA/PulseAudio sound system or have you customised the sound system in any way?
Assuming that your sound system is the default Ubuntu 10.x set-up, are audio applications generally stable?
Do you have many other audio applications installed? In particular do you have LADSPA or LV2 plug-ins installed?
Before building a debug version, it would probably be a good idea to build a clean standard svn head build (Audacity 1.3.13 alpha).
Completely uninstall your current version of Audacity and delete the folder ~/.audacity-data
To install the dependencies:
sudo apt-get build-dep audacity
To download the Audacity source code (you’ll need subversion installed)
There are know compatibility problems with the Ubuntu build of FFmpeg, so while testing do not try to set Audacity Preferences to use FFmpeg. This will mean that Audacity will be limited to the usual WAV and open format file types and no support for WMA, AAC and so on, but that should not be a problem for these testing purposes.
How good/bad is the svn build compared with the default Ubuntu 1.3.12 build?
Steve, thanks for the quick and thorough response.
I’m not sure. I’m actually not the primary user of the machine. My mum is, and she’s non-technical. I also don’t have physical access to it, but I do have easy remote access, and my mum is available to test things out.
10.04 Netbook Edition
Default.
Yes, no other audio problems, no application crashes.
Random crashes/freezes can often me buggy memory… Sometimes can be just a single bit at the very end of the memory range, and only when using more memory-hungry apps, such as audacity, all the memory range is used…
Sometime ago I had such a problem on one of my PC’s. I had 3 dimms on that machine, the third had a faulty bit near the end. Only when all the memory was being used the system crashed. The first time I ran memtest I let it run for a couple of hours and no errors… Later I let it run during the night and only after a few hours the error showed up…