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

Justin M. Streiner streiner at cluebyfour.org
Thu Mar 9 08:09:28 PST 2006


On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Andrew Johnston wrote:

> 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."

I use gentoo on several different machines and platforms, but the machine 
I do anyhting with ardour on is pretty vanilla, and the work I'm doing 
with ardour and jack at the moment is also fairly vanilla - digitizing old 
session tapes and other recordings of my band.  That machine is my 
general purpose do-whatever workstation - it's not dedicated to audio 
work.  At the moment that machine is running:

ASUS P4P800S motherboard w/2.8ghz P4 CPU
 	good mobo, only has two RAM slots though :(
512 MB PC3200 RAM - to be upgraded soon
Matrox Millenium G450 video card
total of 620 GB of storage space (1 x 120 GB PATA, 1 x 200 GB PATA, 1 x 
300 GB SATA-133)
Gentoo - 2.6.14-r5 kernel

For right now, I'm just using the machine's line-in to take audio from the 
original source and monitoring on headphones.  I can occasionally pick up 
a little blitter noise on the headphones, but this does not come through 
in the recordings done in ardour.  I realize this isn't an optimal setup, 
but for what I'm doing right now and the often sketchy audio quality of 
the original recordings, this works just fine for me.

I do have plans down the road to build a dedicated audio workstation with 
better audio interface hardware, but that will be a long time coming.

Bottom line: Gentoo works well for me considering what I do with it.  Post 
from other people on this list suggests that Gentoo also works well in 
more demanding multitrack applications with ardour and jack - I just 
haven't tried that yet ;-)

jms



More information about the Ardour-Users mailing list