[LAU] Rolling ur own software

[Len Ovens]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2015, Russell Hanaghan wrote:

> Are there any real benefits to building software on your local machine 
vs installing binaries, in this case all largely Ubuntu based?

There are some things you just can't get with ubuntu (probably debian is 
not much different). Linux Sampler, ffmpeg, cdrecord, GCDMaster and non* 
are a few that come to mind. If you follow this list at all, There is a 
time lag from when new stuff comes out and when it appears on Ubuntu, so 
things people announce here are not available for some time.

> I've finally got this old mackbook 1,1 (Nov 2006 white 13") running 
linux audio with comparable results to its native OSx 10.6. Whatevah Snow 
LeopRd was. Set up dual boot.

Cool.

> I've removed lots of software I won't use on it like cups, samba, misc 
daemons nibbling away at memory n cycles. Xfce desktop.

I could remove most of those for even my desktop use :)

> Can I gain any performance from building certain software on the 
machine? Mostly, I guess low or more efficient resource usage. Kernel 
included. Right now running SMP lowtatency kernel. I'm still if the 
belief that a RT kernel would be better but obviously in the deb world, 
not so many available.

There is a RT kernel in the Ubuntu repos somewhere (fairly new and 
private, but maitained) I don't think it is there for the last LTS and I 
couldn't find it with casual googling.

Most of the kernel is modules so kernel bloat from trying to support 
everything is not much of a problem... though the kernels do seem to be 
much bigger than when I started and they fit on a floppy.

my almost new i5 is so much faster than the old p4 (4 cores instead of one 
doesn't hurt either) and has 4 times the ram. So that it is quite hard for 
me to notice extra memory/cpu use. I can run 16/2 with my old ice1712 
audio IF with no xruns on the lowlatency kernel, so it is kinda hard to 
spend much time worrying about a RT kernel.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net