[ardour-users] Potential user Ardour questions

[Josh Karnes]

Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> Josh Karnes hat gesagt: // Josh Karnes wrote:
> 
> 
>>I'm running Fedora Core 1 (upgraded from formerly RH8 then RH9) on one of 
>>my PCs that I use daily and it's been solid, reliable and full-featured.  I 
>>really like it.  However, it seems a bit "heavy" for an audio 
>>application...  It's got a lot of fluff that gets installed without any 
>>real choice in the matter.  I have learned that cleaner is better for my 
>>audio PC.
> 
> 
> Well, this isn't Windows: There is no need to reinstall a distribution
> to customize it and make it leaner or a fatty. 

Yeah, that's my current plan.  My comfort level with RH and Fedora type linux
distributions is making me desire to keep it in that family for now.

My current plan is to install FC1 with a patched kernel for low-latency and run
it with Fluxbox and turn off all networking and other kinds of fluff.  I think
it will be much quicker for me to get it running that way with much better odds
at a problem-free installation.

Although Win98SE has been extremely stable for years, just the other day when
thinking about Linux for that machine, I went to clean out one of the hard disks
to make it available for a Linux install.  Lo and behold, Windows has decided to
start dying.  That hard disk is somehow corrupted and won't mount, can't even
fdisk it, and Anaconda installer says that it's got unrecoverable errors (?) and
won't partition it either any better than fdisk will.  I think the cause of this
problem is incompatibility between this particular hard drive and a CD-ROM I put
in there especially to instal Linux, since my normal CD-RW drive is USB/external
and won't boot the system.  I can remove the CD-ROM once the machine is up and
running with Linux, but it's frustrating that I can't install Linux on this disk
due to some unknown problem.

So plan B is to defrag the mostly-unused Windows system disk in the machine and
use FIPS to get a set of Linux partitions on it.  Unfortunately, Windows has
written some kind of error set to that disk as well, and won't defrag it.  Last
I left it this morning it was doing a "surface-scan" type of scandisk operation
in hopes of fixing the errors or marking bad sectors, whatever, so it can defrag
and then FIPS.

Plan C would be to see if there's a later version of the BIOS that may alleviate
the compatibility problem I am sensing with the HD I want to install on and the
CD-ROM I need to install with.  Plan D is to bite the bullet and go ahead and
buy another drive to install from (I need a DVD-RW anyway).  Plan E is sort of
all of the above:  throw away the malfunctioning hard disk and CD-ROM, buy a new
DVD-RW drive,  buy a removeable/quick-change drive bay setup so I can swap my
data drives, get another big data disk and use another spare hard drive I have
laying around for Linux on this machine (have to have swappable data disk bay in
order to have enough IDE bus to include another hard drive).

Whew!

I am beginning to think it'd just be easier to buy a Radar 24 and be done with it.


-- 
Josh Karnes

http://www.krashjones.com
http://www.prophetsandpoets.com