Testing SuperCollider Installation ---------------------------------- To make sure that the SuperCollider install is working properly: 1) Ensure that Jack is running ("jackd -d alsa") 2) Ensure that you're going to run these commands from a directory which contains the subdirectories sounds/ and synthdefs/ (these directories can be initially empty) 3) execute the following command: sclang @DOCBASE@/examples/onetwoonetwo.sc - If all goes well, you'll get some scrolling output, and then you'll hear a looping synth line. If the sclang command just sits there after complaining about some error, hit Ctrl-C to get out of the loop and start reading through the various online docs or filing some bugs to see if you can find what the problem is. Emacs Support ------------- The online documentation seems to be largely of the opinion that emacs is the preferred interface for working with SuperCollider. Since emacs support is optional, you must have emacs in your USE flags if you want to have emacs support compiled in. To start up emacs in SCLang mode, first add the following line to ~/.emacs: (require 'sclang) And then run emacs as "emacs -sclang" Configuration Files ------------------- The main configuration file which loads the various libraries that SuperCollider will use is located at /etc/supercollider/sclang.cfg Values from this file can be overridden in ~/.sclang.cfg, or in .sclang.cfg in the directory sclang is being run from. Another configuration file which controls how SuperConnector connects to Jack, among other miscellaneous functions, can be created as ~/.sclang.sc - Creating this file shouldn't be necessary, but an example is provided in @DOCBASE@/examples Running in General ------------------ Once again, it bears repeating that Jack *must* be running, and the program *must* be started from inside a directory which contains sounds/ and synthdefs/. (Technically, you could alternatively start sclang with the "-d" option to select a different directory containing those two subdirs.) Other Documentation in This Directory ------------------------------------- Included in the SuperCollider source tree are quite a few .rtf files which seem to serve as documentation. I'm not sure exactly how useful these files are, because they may pertain more to the GUI aspects of the older Mac versions of SuperCollider, but they're included in the install tree anyway. More Information ---------------- The Official SuperCollider Homepage http://www.audiosynth.com/ This page may not actually provide too much help, because it's still geared for the Mac versions of SuperCollider, not the Linux versions. Still, it's the official page. SuperCollider Wiki http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/MusicTechnology/6 This is a very informative Wiki devoted to running and developing SuperCollider. Pages of particular interest here: * http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/MusicTechnology/478 General SuperCollider-on-Linux information * http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/MusicTechnology/579 SuperCollider and Emacs SuperCollider Mailing List http://www.create.ucsb.edu/mailman/listinfo/sc-users Probably the best place to go for problems that aren't specifically Gentoo-related