Long standing member of the Linux audio community here, with almost 20 years experience of recording under all 3 major platforms.

Please end the Mac fanboism and answer this poor guys question!

He's asking about LINUX BASED notation software and synths! I'm sure he's well aware of Macs, REAPER and ProTools etc - not that they do what he's after anyway!

Musescore and Rosegarden have already been mentioned for Linux notation software but there is also http://laborejo.org/ , http://denemo.org/ and http://www.frescobaldi.org/ . Laborejo seems to be the most popular in the Linux world these days. I'm not sure which is the best as I don't do notation very often and I've not tried them all. The last few are basically lilypond GUIs.

As for synths, the best (and most powerful) commercial synths for Linux is Loomer's Aspect. Its unbelievably CPU efficient too. As for open source, there is TAL Noizemaker (my fave), zynaddsubfx/Yoshimi, Amsynth and Triceratops are all worth checking out.

Another good free synth (but not open source yet) for Linux is Tunefish - thats my 3rd fave after Noizemaker and Aspect.

The best Linux Audio distros are KXStudio and AVLinux. As for DAWs (which he wasn't asking about, but just for my 2p) Ardour has lots of fans and many people use REAPER under Linux as its officially supported running under wine but my fave Linux DAW is qtractor. Its the fastest and most lightweight modern DAW. It lacks some whizz bang features of the popular commercial DAWs but you may find it does everything you need it to.

If I think 'Rockstar devs' Todd is the first person who comes to mind. Todd designed the first commercial graphics tablet and had it released by Apple, was an early (and flagship) user of the Video Toaster and released arguably the first interactive album which he helped code for Phillips CDi.

Do we have any other notable examples of people successful as both devs and rock stars? There have to be more than just Todd.

"His face is open and alive, with a rosy..."

Rosy eh?

However, Eric Phelps, author of Vatican Assassins, would insist that this is not the 'Rosicrucian mask' of the Baconian's but that the Spear shaker's true identity was that of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

Whatever the real identity of these folks I'll bet my ballsack they're all Widows sons.

I was just about to download FreeIPA and try it under VirtualBox but had the good sense to read the FAQ first where it states:

  IPA Policy

      1.

                    Q: Can I specify different policies for different groups?
                    A: No. The current release of IPA supports one policy for all.

        The PRD for v2 does not explicitly list this requirement. There is, however, some requirement to improve password policies but not to that scope. This will be added to a future feature set. /end quote

Hence it seems FOSS advocates are waiting for IPA v2 or samba 4.x until they have a good chance of really booting MS and proprietary solutions out of the server room at least.

It would seem ZenWorks is the only Linux solution for setting group policies, yet it doesn't list XP Pro SP3 as a supported platform. Does it work fine with SP3 and is nobody working on a FOSS equivalent?

Thanks to everyone who has posted ideas, suggestions and comments so far- I've just finished reading them all now- much appreciated and very interesting stuff.

A few points that I should've mentioned in the original question are that (as most of you correctly assumed being a UK school) nearly all clients are Win XP SP3 with the odd exceptions of a few Vista, Linux and OSX machines. I say migrating to one server but of course that would have a back-up machine- its just that at the moment we have this crazy configuration of two physically separate networks/domains with their own DCs, switches, ISPs etc- one for students one for staff. I inherited one helluva crazy mess, indeed! What I mean is that all this is going to be amalgamated into one physical network and one domain, not one server.

We don't use Exchange so AD/Exchange inter-op isn't a requirement or an issue.

I was aware of eDirectory but didn't mention that in the question because its not FOSS- however this has been recommended much more than Sun's solutions and Apache hasn't even had a look in. I don't want to rule Novell out as a possibility as it may just be better a better long term solution than sticking with AD/2003. It would seem FDS/FreeIPA is the only serious FOSS solution available for this right now

Of course, AD *should* logically be the easiest one to stick with/ 'migrate' to but that doesn't necessarily make it the best choice. I think we'd be more than willing to hire a consultant to help transitions to an alternative if there were numerous long term benefits.

I'm going to have a play with FreeIPA on a small network of test machines or under VirtualBox and see how that goes first I think.