[Ardour-Users] The future?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 06:59 -0400, Justin M. Streiner wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Aug 2010, david headon wrote:
> 
> > Ardour/Jack users from the Gentoo or SuSe community, are there any 
> > advantages to running a system on these platforms?
> 
> I've used Ardour on Gentoo for several years and when you get everything 
> working, it's great.  You have the advantage of being able to tune 
> the system for maximum performance more easily than other distros 
> since you're building your kernel and most packages from source.
> 
> Getting things working (and keeping them working in when faced with 
> upgrades) can be a bit more cumbersome than I'd really like to deal with 
> on a production system.  There have been more than a few times that an 
> upgrade of one library that the author decided not to make backward 
> compatible with previous versions brought an otherwise functional machine 
> to a grinding halt.  I've found that the realtime kernel patch 
> occasionally interfered with rolling basic parts of a new kernel 
> (framebuffer drivers and whatnot), to the point where you end up 
> straying pretty far off the beaten path in terms of being able to get 
> assistance on the Gentoo boards.  Most of the audio/multimedia stuff 
> requires the use of packages from the ~x86 portage tree, which can back 
> you into a corner if you have lots of packages installed and run into 
> another patch of dependency hell.
> 
> I don't mean this to come across as Gentoo bashing - it's just that being 
> able to tune your machine to the degree possible with Gentoo often comes 
> with unanticipated penalties in terms of downtime.  That can probably be 
> minimized by keeping the Ardour machine as much of a "single-tasker" as 
> possible, but for many people that isn't an option.  Another approach that 
> can work is building two machines, and using one as the guinea pig for 
> testing out upgrades to get things stable before upgrading the production 
> system, but many people don't have, or don't want to maintain two separate 
> machines.
> 
> I've played around with it on Arch Linux, and getting it up and running 
> wasn't too bad.  My two issues with Arch were 1. getting SATA RAID 
> (fakeraid) mirrored partitions running was more painful than the docs let 
> on, and 2. I didn't see a way to get a realtime-patched kernel, and my 
> read of various docs and wikis seemed to suggest that the Arch maintainers 
> dind't see the RT patch as being necessary for allowing apps like Ardour 
> to work most efficiently.  That seemed to contradict most everything I've 
> read on the subject.
> 
> The next step for me would probably be to give ubuntustudio, 64studio or 
> AV Linux a try on a test machine.
> 
> jms

A multiple-boot is something, some people don't like, but at least doing
backups, is something everybody should 'maintain'.

Depending to the needs, one should also think about using a distro on 64
or 32 bit architecture.