MuseScore 2.0.x on Ubuntu 12.04?
I'd like to try the new MuseScore, but I'm stuck on 1.3 because of Ubuntu 12.04. Has anyone successfully compiled MS2 for 12.04? I gave it a run awhile ago and it was a disaster. Any chance the MuseScore packaging team will do a backport since 12.04 is a long term support distribution and still being used in the field?
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Your best bet is probably to try a static (self-contained) build of MuseScore (see https://musescore.org/en/node/65801#comment-340241) or compiling manually from the source code.
I help maintain MuseScore packages for Ubuntu, but there is unlikely to be a package for 12.04 because the risk of breaking something is too great. I know 12.04 is a LTS release so it is still supported by Canonical, but that only means you get security updates for it, not new software and not even new features to existing software. Ultimately it is free to upgrade Ubuntu to a more recent version so it doesn't really seem worth the effort to keep MuseScore up-to-date on out-of-date Ubuntu's. I know this isn't a particularly helpful attitude, but here's why...
Packages are designed to be easy to use, so if I release a package for 12.04 then I am effectively saying "this is safe for everyone, even inexperienced users". I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that because any problems created would be very hard for regular users to solve.
The problem is not so much getting MuseScore to run on an old OS, the problem is doing it without breaking something else in the process. MuseScore 2.0.2 uses version 5.4 of the Qt library, but Ubuntu 12.04 only provides Qt version 4.8. If I were to package Qt 5.4 for Ubuntu 12.04 then MuseScore would run fine, but any other Qt programs could stop working. I probably wouldn't even notice the issue since I don't use Ubuntu 12.04 as my regular OS, but for regular users this could cause huge problems.
Static builds solve the library problem by including the library in the binary itself so that it can only be used by MuseScore and no other programs. However, this makes the package a lot bigger and undoes all the hard work that went into making the library separate in the first place.
You are not stuck on 1.3 because of ubuntu 12.04. When ubuntu 12.04 was rolled out they (Canonical/ubuntu) didn't know about MuseScore 2.x coming.
You can get to use MuseScore 2.x by adding repositories, upgrading Qt and libx etc. but you are better off upgrading ubuntu to 15.04 or 15.10. I have a terrible internet connection and it took all night and part of the next day to upgrade ubuntu but I got there without any problems otherwise.
In reply to You are not stuck on 1.3 by underquark
Yes, I realize that I could upgrade the necessary libraries and software in 12.04 but it is far from trivial. There are a lot of dependencies with a Qt upgrade and so much must be compiled from source to get new enough versions of everything that when I started down that path I just ran into a rat's nest.
I was hopeful that maybe MuseScore's library version requirements were stated higher than they needed to be and maybe I could still get away with Qt 4 instead of 5, and so on. If it were a matter of forcing lower versions and it would still work, that would be one thing, but if the programming really makes use of newer version features, then of course there's no way but upgrade.
I'll get off 12.04 eventually, I'm just not much for upgrading my whole distribution very often because of the downtime and potential glitches.
I confirm no problem with Kubuntu 15.04, using Libreoffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Kexi, some other auxiliaries, and of course Mscore 2 (and even instable 2.1)
@ by bwv582 Which are your main softwares ..... I could try them.....
I know exactly where you are coming from. But I did take the plunge to 14.04, and I'm happy I did, and have had few problems. They've unfortunately removed some features from Nautilus. Nemo is commonly recommended as an excellent substitute. I still use Nautilus most of the time, but use Nemo occasionally.
For what it is worth I have moved away from local storage fat client PCs to cloud based thin client browser based computing. Most of what I need is available robustly and elegantly using Chromebases and Chromebooks.
I have a linux box which I use very little now, mostly for preprocessing raw image files. It seems arcane (to me) that Musescore is stuck in the old computing model. I have seen the appeals to provide a web based version of Musescore and the arguments make a lot of sense. The computing requirements are minimal, HTML5 is powerful and universal across OSs.
I maintain the old linux box but don't upgrade the OS because that is a big headache that cloud based computing does transparently. I have a couple of Raspberry Pi's; the Pi2 runs Musescore 1.3 very nicely, but these are educational tools for my son.
Just my 2 Euro-cents worth.
In reply to For what it is worth I have by [DELETED] 71557
I understand the advantages of being able to access and work easily from multiple locations. However, I do not always work in areas where internet access is available, so I don't always mind the local software model. For me, local software tends to be faster and more feature-rich. Cloud computing shifts the processing burden to another machine(s), but the burden is still there. Is there such thing as "The law of conservation of computing"?!
But since I should be talking about Musescore... I will say that I'm still using 1.3, although maybe in another year or so I'll have time to upgrade my OS and take a crack at the new version. Just too many projects and too little time to get around to them. A problem shared by us all, I'm sure!
A lot of the processing for cloud based software is done locally in the browser, but I take your point about not always being connected to the Internet.
This is a problem for all cloud based software. Google has provided a solution that normally works by caching the data in such a way that a temporary instance is retained locally until such time as a connection is available. So I use gmail, docs and sheets offline when I don't have a connection.
I accept your reservations about this technique and each of us must judge for ourselves whether the data resides on the local machine or the cloud with advantages and disadvantages for both.