SuperCollider is an audio/music synthesis environment: a combination of an audio-centric programming language and a highly efficient synthesis server. Website here: http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/
Here's how I installed in on default Xandros (i.e. not even in "advanced" mode):
In order to make it easy to add the required software, follow these instructions: Adding Additional Software Repositories
I installed these things by starting a command window (Ctrl+Alt+T) then typing "sudo synaptic" to launch the graphical interface for installing software.
(i.e. things for compiling software. I installed the build-essential package for this; some more detailed description at Installing Development Tools)
JACK is a very widely-used audio infrastructure for linux. I installed 4 separate packages:
Some other packages are required, here's what I installed:
You can download the source-code from Sourceforge. Alternatively you can directly get it from the Subversion repository (this gets the latest bleeding-edge version):
svn co https://supercollider.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/supercollider/trunk SuperCollider3
This creates a folder "SuperCollider3" and downloads the source code into it; takes 30 secs or so.
The "scons" system can build SuperCollider in various configurations (use "scons -h" to see the available options). However, I just did this:
cd SuperCollider3 scons sudo scons install
The "scons" line does the compilation, and takes about 5 minutes. The last line installs SuperCollider, and takes about 30 seconds.
SwingOSC is a Java-based GUI system that works nicely with SuperCollider to let you build your own GUIs. You don't need it, it's totally optional, but kinda nice. Download site inc install instructions are at http://www.sciss.de/swingOSC/
Here's how I installed it: after unzipping the download I moved it to /usr/local/SwingOSC - but then, to make sure that SuperCollider could access the SwingOSC-specific files, I created a symlink from SuperCollider's extensions directory to the extensions that SwingOSC provides:
sudo ln -s /usr/local/SwingOSC/SuperCollider /usr/local/share/SuperCollider/Extensions/SwingOSC
In order to make sure SuperCollider connects correctly to SwingOSC I edited my SuperCollider startup file (vim /home/user/.sclang.sc ) and added the following lines:
GUI.swing; SwingOSC.program = "/usr/local/SwingOSC/build/SwingOSC.jar"; g = SwingOSC.default; g.boot;
The final line makes the GUI manager boot automatically when I start SuperCollider.
Firstly make sure you've got jack running. I started it by running this command:
sudo jackstart --realtime --timeout 1000 -d alsa -r 44100 --period 256 -n 4 &
Then you can run the Linux test script (to make some noise) by typing:
sudo sclang linux/examples/onetwoonetwo.sc
That runs SuperCollider from the command-line. Press Ctrl-C when you want it to stop.
Once you've got that working you probably want to use SuperCollider's emacs interface, which you can launch by typing
sudo emacs -sclang
By the way, a friend of mine helped me measure the latency of the system. Running audio input --> SuperCollider --> audio output, the total latency was measured as 23.78 milliseconds, which is pretty darn good actually.
Now the fun begins. Not sure what's best to recommend, but here are a couple of tutorial resources:
(c) 2008 Dan Stowell.
I've also added this information to the eeeuser.com wiki at wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:installingsupercollider - other users may have added info to that page.