[ardour-users] Setting up a gentoo box for ardour

[Andrew Johnston]

Hi everyone,
I am currently running a dual boot FC4/ccrma and 64studio setup on an AMD64
X2 3800+ with 2 gig RAM and a RME HDSP9652.  Unfortuanately neither of these
distros are providing for me what I'm after in terms of using ardour.
64studio is fast and has no problems handling AMD's clock timing issues,
however it is quite unstable (and I'm not expecting it to be at the moment
anyway), where ardour will often crash multiple times during a session,
making it hard to work with.  CCRMA is pretty rock solid, however I find
fedora a little bloated and latency is much higher as well as getting those
AMD specific clock timing jack issues, and with a CCRMA setup I am left at
the mercy of Fernandos time to get the latest updates, which at the moment
he has very little of (no slight on Fernando...he is an absolute legend to
have done such a good job with CCRMA).  But my current problem is I need the
most uptodate kernel and jack to solve my AMD CPU problems.  Now I know I
could go about building my own kernel with a realtime patch, and getting
ardour and jack via cvs...however I just don't have the time and energy to
learn about how to do that.  What I was wondering was, how hard is it to get
all this happening with gentoo?  I found this part of the 'about gentoo' the
most interesting, "When you want to install a package, you type emerge
packagename, at which point Portage automatically builds a custom version of
the package to your exact specifications, optimizing it for your hardware
and ensuring that the optional features in the package that you want are
enabled -- and those you don't want aren't."
Now I have tried building stuff from source with fedora, and it drives me up
the wall trying to chase down missing dependencies, and then having some
strange error occur during a build with a message I can't understand.  I
guess I'm trying to say is that I'm an audio-engineer with a fulltime
teaching job and I don't want to have to become a pseudo-software engineer
just to get a stable, quick, working version of ardour. So I was wondering
if gentoo might be able to help me get all the necessary components together
with minimal pain and torment, but give me the stability and speed I am
looking for.  I am quite happy to settle for a 32bit install if a 64bit one
is still a bit pie in the sky as well.  Anybody who would like to email me
privately is quite welcome.  I would appreciate any help/pointers from
current gentoo users.
My email address is: andyandtaya at gmail.com.

Thanks Again,
Solv
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