[ardour-users] CCRMA vs. AGNULA

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 04:46, derek holzer wrote:
> I found RedHat/Fedora to be *very* bloated with stuff that is not 
> necessary for running a DAW. The difference of startup times alone 
> between RedHat/Fedora and Gentoo or Debian is staggering, so I can image 
> that the OS itself probably sucks up a lot of resources.

I don't think this statement is quite complete. RedHat/Fedora, Gentoo
and Debian are all general purpose distributions. All of them have a LOT
of stuff available that has nothing to do with audio or a DAW. The
difference lies in what services are installed and activated by default.
And that changes from version to version so bundling RedHat and Fedora
in the same hat :-) is not completely fair.  

I'd call the linux kernel the "OS itself", and that will consume
approximately the same resources in the three distributions mentioned
above (provided we are talking about the same stable series of the
kernel, for example, 2.6.x for the current one). 

> Of course, 
> running "ps aux" and looking at the number of active processes also 
> gives you a clue. RedHat/Fedora has up to three times as many things 
> running in the background!!!

The trend in the RedHat/Fedora world has been to have less services
active by default. The number of processes you see depends on what you
choose to install and that is true for all Linux distributions.
Obviously the default choice changes with each distro and some may
install less stuff by default and be, by some measure, more suitable for
a "pure DAW" machine. 

In the RedHat/Fedora world there are different "install targets", from a
persoanl desktop with no development tools to a full server, to an
"everything" custom install target that, predictable, installs a lot of
stuff you may never even know existed :-) 

> Even with Fluxbox, which is *extremely* light, it still took several 
> minutes for the desktop to come up on my old 1 GHz Athlon machine. The 
> lag was also quite noticable on a 1.6 GHz P4 laptop. Both of these 
> machines startup right away with Gentoo now.

That sounds very wrong even if you installed everything (so that, for
example, you had all internet services installed and active). If the
startup time was measured in _minutes_ I'd say there was a configuration
problem with domain name resolution - the timeouts for that service are
quite long. Which version was this happening on?

-- Fernando