Rivendell has paid support available from its owner, Paravel. Anybody can buy support or a turnkey system from them; and it is not in Zimbabwe, but in the DC area.
Activity on the Rivendell forum makes it clear that cost is the primary reason most of those users are adopting it. Reliability turns out to be a Rivendell advantage for those who get it installed correctly. One user (24 hour network originator) recently reported over 5 years on their main playout system with zero down time, and the only reason they took it down was for some hardware upgrades. Only in cases where money is no object, can Rivendell and Linux be peremptorily excluded; those with very limited funds cannot use the excuse that it may be too difficult for a tech to set up, so lets spend thousands on a Windows system, instead.
Over the years, I have had to deal in a professional capacity with Unix, DEC, CP/M, DOS, Windows, Mac, and now Linux systems. All have a learning curve, but one of the great advantages of Unix and Linux, after you learn your way around, is the great number of system tracking logs that can help identify where problems are, when they occur.
My group has been exploring Rivendell, and if you are having sound problems, don’t look to Rivendell as the problem, look to Linux. My advice would be to stay with hardware that is neither old nor cutting edge new, but “current”. Don’t test it on an old box that has been sitting in the corner for years and is a decade old. Use current hardware. (It is true that some aficionados have written Linux drivers for obscure old stuff--but it is sheer luck if you run into that.) Rivendell will work on anything Linux will support, including the mainboard soundcard, external soundcards, and USB soundcards (or a combination of all of them). In Rivendell 1.x versions, ASI soundcards were required to encode/decode MP2 files, but with the 2.x versions, Rivendell can now encode/decode with software, and the (again expensive) ASI cards are no longer necessary, opening up a lot more economical alternatives. Rivendell can import MP3 and FLAC, but it stores files internally only as either WAV or MP2 (switchable in setup).
Rivendell was formerly developed on SuSE, but there was a switch to CentOS earlier this year. Several Linux experts on the Rivendell forum recommend Ubuntu (NOT with KDE desktop, though--as it has incompatibilities that cause problems with Rivendell). Like those here who prefer Windows’ ease of setup, CentOS is a bear to deal with; Ubuntu is comparatively easy.
Unfortunately, none of the appliance iso’s are up to date, nor is there an Ubuntu software package manager download for v2.x--only v1.x. Best to compile your own from the CVS head. Start here:
http://www.thevoiceasia.com/rivendell/Rivendell_2_on_Ubuntu_1104.pdf
Longtime Rivendell forum members advise against using anything but the LTS versions of Ubuntu--although I have it working acceptably on 11.04. And, as someone earlier noted, do not update the production system (it should be isolated from the Internet, anyway). Many a submission to the Rivendell forum has come from someone who destroyed a perfectly working Rivendell system by doing a Linux update.
According to Paravel, the number of systems they know about are in the hundreds, but I suspect it is now easily over a thousand. There is an active development community in France and Germany, supporting systems worldwide. The Rivendell forum regularly has users commenting from Brazil and several other South American countries, Australia and New Zealand, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and a couple of Nordic countries.
