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

[Mark Knecht]

On 3/9/06, Andrew Johnston <andyandtaya at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hi Andrew,
   Like others who have responded I run Ardour on a Gentoo 64-bit
install using an Asus MB, 1GB, SATA & 1394 hard drives, ATI video,
3000+ single core processor, HDSP9652. Overall it's been a reasonably
positive experience, but not perfect. I have had the HDSP9652 in
multiple machines - FC2/PlanetCCRMA, Gentoo 32-bit/AthlonXP and this
one. I never had xrun problems with the apps I use on the previous two
platforms but I do see the occasional xrun on this machine. Overall
it's a very low level problem but the problem is there for me none the
less.

   I love Gentoo. It's easily the most stable distro I've used. My
whole house runs on Gentoo now. I have two machines in the studio. My
wife's desktop is Gentoo which also serves as a MythTV server. We have
two other small machines running Gentoo as Myth frontend machines at
each of the major TVs in the house. These machines hardly ever hickup.

   The one downside I will point out on Gentoo is there is no standard
audio kernel so low latency stuff is something you'll have to build
for yourself. It's not a big deal to get Ingo's stuff, if you want to
go that way. You can get Con's kernel through emerge if that happens
to be how you want to approach things. Just be forewarned that the
kernel is your responsibility.

Hope this helps,
Mark