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

Thu Mar 9 17:58:03 PST 2006

Wow, thanks so much everyone for the fantastic responses...this mailing list
has me addicted (almost).
Pasi, as I write this I have taken the steps to remove both my installs and
reformat my whole drive to house gentoo....i'm even experimenting with
logical partitions to house a seperate /usr and /home directories....we'll
see.
I guess the one thing I would love to know, is where to start in terms of
getting not only ardour and jack/qjackctl but also how to go about getting
hold of a low-latency patched kernel, alsa utils that have the hdspmixer
included...things like that.
If I can get a rock solid high performance setup happening, I will try to
look into what it takes to package that up into a distro for all the suckers
like me that have bought dual core 64bit AMDs thinking they would be the
best option!

Many thanks for all the advise and support, look forward to sharing a
success story soon..ish!!

Andrew Johnston

On 3/10/06, Pasi Karppinen <pasi.karppinen at pp6.inet.fi> wrote:
>
> Andrew Johnston wrote:
>
> > 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
>
>
> Hello Andrew,
>
> I hear you. I've tried Planet CCRMA and I also bought the commercial
> StudioToGo! software package, but I've never been 100% satisfied with
> any one of these. OK now, both of these audio distributions are actually
> awesome and most people will be even more than 100% satisfied with any
> one of them. There is absolutely no doubt about that - people behind
> these distributions have done amazing job and know what they are doing!
> I shall congratulate them for doing such an amazing job! (Huge thank you
> to Paul Davis as well - Ardour sparked my fire! (expect to get a paypal
> donation soon ;) Not to forget Dave Phillips, who has done amazing job
> introducing Linux audio to us who were not familiar with its potential)
>
> However, I'm one of those people who ultimately wanted to go their own
> way. I'm in the minority - I acknowledge that. I installed LFS
> (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org) system. Why see all that trouble?
> Because I wanted to see if I can do it and I wanted to see if it would
> make any difference. Well, the biggest reason for me to do it was
> because neither one of these audio distributions could satisfy my needs
> if I wanted to do something else than audio work. I also wanted to take
> one step further and gain more knowledge about Linux and Linux audio in
> general. I guess I ultimately just wanted to be in the driver's seat.
>
> I'm not done yet - this mission is incomplete, but let me tell you
> something - every step's been worth it! This LFS system I'm running
> right now is more satisfying than any other Linux distribution I've ever
> tried before. Is it any faster than precompiled regular distributions?
> Well, I don't have enough knowledge to measure that in any scientific
> and accurate way, but at least I can tell you that it boots in less than
> 15 seconds to fully operational XFCE desktop and no other distribution
> I've tried before has been able to do that with this hardware. This is,
> of course, possible because I have only installed software I want to run
> on this computer. No need to run any extra services I will never need.
> Overall desktop responsiveness is also very nice! Better than ever.
> However, I'm willing to believe that you can configure basically any
> distribution to suit your needs if you really want to and neither one of
> them will be faster than the other if you know what you're doing.
>
> OK, let's talk more about my journey :) Sometimes I think "yeah, I need
> that software" - and a while later I've got it. To my surprise it's
> really been that easy! When I used precompiled distributions I was never
> sure how something was installed (this was not a problem until you had
> to compile something by yourself. Let's face it - NONE of the
> repositories of well known distributions had all the software I wanted)
> - now I have a pretty clear image about what is installed, how it is
> installed and where it is installed. I've been able to install a desktop
> system that satisfies almost all my needs. This is a journey I started a
> couple of months ago and I've done a lot of research and I've "wasted"
> (not really wasted, because I've learned so much!) a lot of hours, but
> the result is better than I could ever expect. I believe when I'm done I
> have a system that is actually better than I could ever dream of.
>
> Has there been any problems? You bet! There's been a couple of problems,
> but it amazes me that only a couple. What kind of problems? Well, let me
> give you two examples:
>
> 1) I realised that you can't have Ingo Molnar's realtime preemption
> kernel patch and Nvidia binary drivers installed at the same time (at
> least on SMP machine). What happens? When you start X, the Nvidia driver
> freezes the machine. This was a hard lesson. You don't want to push the
> reset button. Fortunately the filesystem recovered. Hopefully someone
> finds a solution to this problem. I hope Nvidia would make their drivers
> open source. Molnar's patch + Nvidia drivers would be a killer
> combination! I had a taste of Ingo Molnar's realtime patch and damn - I
> can't believe how responsive the desktop was!
>
> 2) I had a trouble compiling qjackctl. Instructions say you only need to
> set QTDIR environment parameter before compiling the software. Well, it
> was set to /usr. "./configure --prefix=/usr" part went fine, but "make"
> failed, because it couldn't find some QT header files. These header
> files are located in /usr/include/qt -directory. Fortunately I found a
> solution by using Google. After "./configure" I had to type "sed -i
> s,include,include/qt, qjackctl.mak" and after that it compiled nicely.
>
> As you can see, you can have _your own system_, but it requires that you
> have at least a couple of years of previous experience with Linux. I
> started using Linux in 1998 (Suse 5.something if I remember
> correctly),but  I'm really not an expert myself (if I'd be an expert,
> I'd be coding), but I consider myself more experienced than average
> Linux user. I can't recommend LFS to anyone, because I know that most
> people will not have the energy (although I'm sure many would have the
> ability) to learn to build a satisfying system and I believe that you
> don't really even have to do it nowadays. Like I said, I believe every
> Linux distribution can be tailored to suit your personal needs if you
> really want to make that happen.
>
> So, I would say that go ahead! Install Gentoo and try to make it to suit
> _your needs_! That's what this is all about! OSS is about choice! What
> can you lose if you try? Well, some hours, but you will probably learn a
> lot even if you waste some hours. It is pretty clear to me that you can
> achieve your goal if you really want to. I also believe Gentoo is a
> great choice as a base for audio system. So, go ahead and make it happen!
>
> Also, watch this closely :) Ubuntu is a very big and very nice
> distribution and hopefully it will become a distribution for Linux
> musicians as well.
>
> http://ubuntustudio.com
>
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