[PlanetCCRMA] added: planet ho ho ho!

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

Hi all... well, have you all been good during this past year? Or have
you been naughty? :-) ;-) :-)

My elves[*] have been working non-stop but still didn't churn out all I
wanted for this holiday season. Still, some dangerous toys were finished
just in time, sort of. 

Preliminary, dangerous and exciting kernel and initial package support
for Fedora Core 3 is now available. Why would you be running Fedora Core
3 when support for Fedora Core 2 is not stable yet? I don't want to
know. But if you are doing that (naughty!) then this may help, or then
again, it may not. Better try this on a new disk. 

This does __NOT__ mean I recommend all of you upgrade or install FC3.
Don't. 

So you were not listening. Install apt in fc3 (sorry, yum support not
there yet):

rpm -Uvh
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/3/i386/apt-0.5.15cnc6-2.rhfc3.i386.rpm

Then:
  apt-get update
  apt-get install planetccrma-core

  reboot
  select new kernel from grub screen
  cross your fingers

This kernel (shortly coming to mess up your Fedora Core 2 machine as
well) is based on Ingo Molnar's latest realtime preemption patchset
(0.7.33-04). It is built on top of 2.6.10-rc3-mm1 so it is experimental
from the get go. But well, when it runs, it runs very well. 

You may notice that planetccrma-core now installs two additional tiny
packages (rtirq and rtload). The first one, courtesy of Rui Nuno Capela
(thanks!), tries to assign reasonable priorities to the IRQ threads of
the realtime patched kernel. Important if you want good low latency
performance. The second automatically loads the realtime kernel module
so that Jack can be used as a non-root user (the realtime module has
been updated to the latest version available so it is now called
"realtime", not "realcap", and the "allcaps" option is no longer
available - for that use "any=1" as a load option, the default). 

So, after the reboot you should be ready to go (assuming the kernel
managed to boot on your machine :-) So:

  apt-get install qjackctl

[BTW: you may also want to enable the alsasound startup script so that
the snd-seq kernel module gets loaded, otherwise it does not unless you
have midi hardware.]

Start qjackctl and configure the realtime priority jack runs at to "60"
(to see the priorities of the irq threads do /etc/rc.d/init.d/rtirq
status). Rui tells me that that works well for him. 

Also, change the name of the program qjackctl calls to "jackd" instead
of "jackstart" (jackstart will work but will print some errors you
should ignore). Press the "play" button. 

Voila, you should have jack up and running......

  apt-get install synaptic

Select packages, install, see what happens.....
Not everything is there yet, of course. 
Happy Holidays!
-- Fernando

[*] you probably have them as well, rpm -q elfutils

PS: I already have the same kernel built for FC2, just waiting for a
moment of free time to release it. Just to wet your apetite :-)