[Ardour-Users] Which distro best supports Ardour using the Delta 44 (ICE1712)?

[Noel Darlow]

Hi

> Noel, I think I'm going to take your advice and try Gentoo with the
> pro audio overlay. I appreciate your offer for additional details, and
> I will contact you directly when the process is further along. 

"Mirror" partitions.

First you need to separate out OS/apps from data. The principle is to
move any filesystems with large amounts of data out of whatever
partition / is mounted on. At its simplest, this just means
mounting /home/ on a separate partition. Depends exactly what you're
using the computer for. I work as a webmaster so I've also
moved /var/www/ onto its own partition.

What's left is OS/apps (more or less). It should be pretty small. My /
partition is 30gb out of which I've used 14gb.

Create a second partition of the same size. Do the same for /boot/ if
that's mounted separately. These are your "mirror" partitions. Now you
can do regular backups of / and /boot/ with rsync to maintain a mirror
image of the current OS & apps. Because the backups are on dedicated
partitions, you can recover very quickly from an update which breaks
your system in some way. A couple of quick edits, run grub, and you're
up and running again within minutes. Chroot into the broken OS and fix
the problems at your leisure.

Although I think this is particularly important for a distro like
Gentoo which has frequent updates, it's a good strategy to follow on any
computer so I hope it's OK to post this on the Ardour list. 

I use my own machine for work as well as audio so I can't afford any
downtime. With a bootable backup you'll never have any. If there is no
cost of failure you're free to experiment with different software
versions, try out some beta stuff, and so on.

One obvious but important point: never do a new backup (overwriting the
old one) until you've confirmed the latest updates are OK.

> These
> audio-related distros are convenient, but I learned so much more when
> I was managing my own installations. I want to try reconnecting with
> what's "under the hood."

You'll like Gentoo then. It's not really hard to pick up. There's a
lot of good documentation to walk you through a first install and a busy
Gentoo forum where you can ask for help if you need it. This is the
topic for pro-audio stuff: 

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-790360.html

By all means check out the others too though. Virtualbox is handy for
that.


Noel