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<p class=MsoNormal>Thanks for everyone’s input on this topic.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>First of all, I’d like to say it would be a sad day
for Linux audio if Fernando ever decided to go do something else (the ‘something
else’ would benefit, but linux audio would suffer). I hope it doesn’t
come to pass anytime soon. However, I also recognize ‘we are
standing on the shoulders of giants’. Stanford University (home of
CCRMA) has a very long history with computer music dating at least back to the
60s and has shown ‘world leadership’ in sound since at least the
70s (before many of you were born).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>A little bit about myself… I’m more ‘black
Bakelite phone with rotary dial’ type of guy. I like things
to be simple and very apparent and don’t like it much when they deviate
from the obvious. During my first experience with FC8 audio, I
installed it on a surplus Sun V40z that I got off ebay (as an interesting side
topic, it may have come from Stanford!!). My reasoning was simple…
it had hot-swappable hard disks, and it would be fairly easy to test out both a
32 bit and 64 bit driver just by changing the disks. When the
driver (at the time) was downloaded and compiled, Jack would work, but there
were periodic xruns, and seemed to be related to disk activity every couple of
seconds. One of the developers (Rick Macri) correctly remembered
that he ran into this problem with his daw many years ago – fast scsi
disks just provided too many interrupts. He correctly suggested
that I change platforms (which I did) and the problem with xruns went away.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>When I built up a DAW, I used an older shuttle case this
time that I had been keeping in my ‘hope chest’ (it was a couple of
year olds and used one of the ‘transition’ processors from AMD that
was ~700pin but 64 bit capable). After a lot of futzing around
discovering various problems, such as the fact I had to set the newly purchased
disks to Sata I instead of Sata II for them to appear, I was able
to install FC8. I was also able to determine there was a reason the two
19” monitors were in the basement, which is because they needed to be
thrown away (which I did later). I had also elected to
install 2 GL cards because the Windows driver supports up to 3 cards (2
comfortably).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I had issues with getting sound to come out from either the
newly minted linux drivers or from the Via onboard chipset (although the Via
soundcard seemed to work better, it had more latency). One of the
big issues was trying to figure out from the Jack messages, the dmesgs, or the
scsconfig.log or scsrun.log what the issues were. So far, I’ve
de-installed anything related to pulse-audio (because of Jack messages, and
because it seems to default to 2 audio channels running 44.1khz). I’m
also very wary of ‘new’ stuff, and noticed that this is supposed to
be a replacement for Jack. I’d just as soon wait until it is
known and proven to be better than Jack (I just switched from CVS to SVN last
month). I also disabled the firewall, because I didn’t want
to spend many hours googling issues only to discover it is ‘security’
related (I need to get X out of the system and on to a PC, for instance).
Fedora is really a beta release for RedHat, so, you are always on the ‘bleeding
edge’ for a few months until the fixes come out. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I can understand permissions and ownership, but I don’t
necessarily understand how you can get something owned by user-root, group-root
with no world r/w to work unless there is some ACL structure (which I don’t
want to understand or have to know the details of). I do believe based
on experience that some reasonable percentage of the folks trying out sound
(and especially Jack) on a FC8 linux daw are running into problems and giving
up. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>However, one of the strongest points of CCRMA is the great
community support that is offered, if someone were willing to discuss it and
see it thru. As was said about unix years ago, “there are a hundred
different, but difficult, answers to any problem”. I think we
can pick one of them to get past the permissions/ownership device issues.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The Planet has really done a good job of helping people out
over the years. There is usually some type of
workaround. The issue we’re currently facing is to explain to
a Windows DAW user ( the average user of a GL cards) the compelling reasons to
switch to Linux. Have PlanetCCRMA available is one of the reasons.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>-Mike<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>PS – one small off topic side note – Dave Marion
had found that the Gadget Labs cards can be clocked together even if they are
in different systems. This opens up the question of multiple Jacks
on multiple systems. It may be that multiple GL cards on multiple
systems with sync’d clocks may be the least expensive Wave Front
Synthesis system when coupled with several inexpensive 5.1 sound PC
speakers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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