Wow, thanks so much everyone for the fantastic responses...this mailing list has me addicted (almost). <br>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.
<br>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.
<br>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!
<br><br>Many thanks for all the advise and support, look forward to sharing a success story soon..ish!!<br><br>Andrew Johnston<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/10/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Pasi Karppinen</b>
<<a href="mailto:pasi.karppinen@pp6.inet.fi">pasi.karppinen@pp6.inet.fi</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Andrew Johnston wrote:<br><br>> where ardour will often crash multiple times during a session, making<br>> it hard to work with. CCRMA is pretty rock solid, however I find<br>> fedora a little bloated and latency is much higher as well as getting
<br>> those AMD specific clock timing jack issues, and with a CCRMA setup I<br>> am left at the mercy of Fernandos time to get the latest updates<br><br><br>Hello Andrew,<br><br>I hear you. I've tried Planet CCRMA and I also bought the commercial
<br>StudioToGo! software package, but I've never been 100% satisfied with<br>any one of these. OK now, both of these audio distributions are actually<br>awesome and most people will be even more than 100% satisfied with any
<br>one of them. There is absolutely no doubt about that - people behind<br>these distributions have done amazing job and know what they are doing!<br>I shall congratulate them for doing such an amazing job! (Huge thank you
<br>to Paul Davis as well - Ardour sparked my fire! (expect to get a paypal<br>donation soon ;) Not to forget Dave Phillips, who has done amazing job<br>introducing Linux audio to us who were not familiar with its potential)
<br><br>However, I'm one of those people who ultimately wanted to go their own<br>way. I'm in the minority - I acknowledge that. I installed LFS<br>(<a href="http://www.linuxfromscratch.org">http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
</a>) system. Why see all that trouble?<br>Because I wanted to see if I can do it and I wanted to see if it would<br>make any difference. Well, the biggest reason for me to do it was<br>because neither one of these audio distributions could satisfy my needs
<br>if I wanted to do something else than audio work. I also wanted to take<br>one step further and gain more knowledge about Linux and Linux audio in<br>general. I guess I ultimately just wanted to be in the driver's seat.
<br><br>I'm not done yet - this mission is incomplete, but let me tell you<br>something - every step's been worth it! This LFS system I'm running<br>right now is more satisfying than any other Linux distribution I've ever
<br>tried before. Is it any faster than precompiled regular distributions?<br>Well, I don't have enough knowledge to measure that in any scientific<br>and accurate way, but at least I can tell you that it boots in less than
<br>15 seconds to fully operational XFCE desktop and no other distribution<br>I've tried before has been able to do that with this hardware. This is,<br>of course, possible because I have only installed software I want to run
<br>on this computer. No need to run any extra services I will never need.<br>Overall desktop responsiveness is also very nice! Better than ever.<br>However, I'm willing to believe that you can configure basically any<br>
distribution to suit your needs if you really want to and neither one of<br>them will be faster than the other if you know what you're doing.<br><br>OK, let's talk more about my journey :) Sometimes I think "yeah, I need
<br>that software" - and a while later I've got it. To my surprise it's<br>really been that easy! When I used precompiled distributions I was never<br>sure how something was installed (this was not a problem until you had
<br>to compile something by yourself. Let's face it - NONE of the<br>repositories of well known distributions had all the software I wanted)<br>- now I have a pretty clear image about what is installed, how it is<br>installed and where it is installed. I've been able to install a desktop
<br>system that satisfies almost all my needs. This is a journey I started a<br>couple of months ago and I've done a lot of research and I've "wasted"<br>(not really wasted, because I've learned so much!) a lot of hours, but
<br>the result is better than I could ever expect. I believe when I'm done I<br>have a system that is actually better than I could ever dream of.<br><br>Has there been any problems? You bet! There's been a couple of problems,
<br>but it amazes me that only a couple. What kind of problems? Well, let me<br>give you two examples:<br><br>1) I realised that you can't have Ingo Molnar's realtime preemption<br>kernel patch and Nvidia binary drivers installed at the same time (at
<br>least on SMP machine). What happens? When you start X, the Nvidia driver<br>freezes the machine. This was a hard lesson. You don't want to push the<br>reset button. Fortunately the filesystem recovered. Hopefully someone
<br>finds a solution to this problem. I hope Nvidia would make their drivers<br>open source. Molnar's patch + Nvidia drivers would be a killer<br>combination! I had a taste of Ingo Molnar's realtime patch and damn - I<br>
can't believe how responsive the desktop was!<br><br>2) I had a trouble compiling qjackctl. Instructions say you only need to<br>set QTDIR environment parameter before compiling the software. Well, it<br>was set to /usr. "./configure --prefix=/usr" part went fine, but "make"
<br>failed, because it couldn't find some QT header files. These header<br>files are located in /usr/include/qt -directory. Fortunately I found a<br>solution by using Google. After "./configure" I had to type "sed -i
<br>s,include,include/qt, qjackctl.mak" and after that it compiled nicely.<br><br>As you can see, you can have _your own system_, but it requires that you<br>have at least a couple of years of previous experience with Linux. I
<br>started using Linux in 1998 (Suse 5.something if I remember<br>correctly),but I'm really not an expert myself (if I'd be an expert,<br>I'd be coding), but I consider myself more experienced than average<br>Linux user. I can't recommend LFS to anyone, because I know that most
<br>people will not have the energy (although I'm sure many would have the<br>ability) to learn to build a satisfying system and I believe that you<br>don't really even have to do it nowadays. Like I said, I believe every
<br>Linux distribution can be tailored to suit your personal needs if you<br>really want to make that happen.<br><br>So, I would say that go ahead! Install Gentoo and try to make it to suit<br>_your needs_! That's what this is all about! OSS is about choice! What
<br>can you lose if you try? Well, some hours, but you will probably learn a<br>lot even if you waste some hours. It is pretty clear to me that you can<br>achieve your goal if you really want to. I also believe Gentoo is a
<br>great choice as a base for audio system. So, go ahead and make it happen!<br><br>Also, watch this closely :) Ubuntu is a very big and very nice<br>distribution and hopefully it will become a distribution for Linux<br>
musicians as well.<br><br><a href="http://ubuntustudio.com">http://ubuntustudio.com</a><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>ardour-users mailing list<br><a href="mailto:ardour-users@lists.ardour.org">
ardour-users@lists.ardour.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-users-ardour.org">http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-users-ardour.org</a><br></blockquote></div><br>