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

[Paul Davis]

On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 21:57 +1030, Andrew Johnston wrote:
>  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.

this is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect.

however, what is slightly less reasonable is to expect that this will be
easy given an arbitrary hardware platform. as it happens, you have
chosen just about the hardest possible platform to make this all work.
64 bit on AMD X2 is the most problematic. settling for 32 bit may help a
little, but the X2 in particular is a real problem unless you are
willing to be out on the bleeding edge of kernels and JACK versions.

it would have been wise if you wanted to avoid the role of pseudo-
software engineer to have checked in on the h/w setup early. it is worth
noting that at some point in the not too distant past ProTools was
supported on only a single Intel/Windows machine, built by IBM. we don't
want to be that restrictive, but you've definitely made life harder for
yourself by choosing leading edge hardware.

gentoo may be able to help here, but you'll play even more of the
pseudo-software-engineer on that system if my impression is correct.
the real issue here is that without a bleeding edge kernel and/or
bleeding edge JACK (i.e. using a patch that is not even in the main CVS
branch), you will not get this to work well.

--p