[linux-audio-dev] [OT] linux audio on PPCi

[Robert Jonsson]

Hi,

Sunday 30 November 2003 19.00 skrev Christian Schoenebeck:
> Es geschah am Donnerstag, 27. November 2003 11:42 als
>
> vincent.touquet at pandora.be schrieb:
> > I know some applications are not ported yet to ppc and suffer from
> > x86-isms, but that should be fixable I guess :)
>
> It's not only orphaned asm lines but also endian dependent code that makes
> a lot of trouble on non intel machines. It seems that lot of programs
> suffer this problem, but there is one project that takes very care about
> endian correctness, what was it name? Hmmm... ah, yeah it's called
> LinuxSampler I think.  ;P
>
> Anyway, whatever brand or type you'll choose, I recommend you that it has
> an ATI graphics chip, so you don't have to install extra proprietary opengl
> drivers for X like it's the case with Nvidia, 

I think this an urban myth, the Nvidia drivers may be proprietary but they are 
well functioning. Actually there are opensource drivers for nvidia chips, it 
is true though that only the proprietary drivers support OpenGL.
The situation isn't much different with ATI, tbough there may be open source 
OpenGL enabled drivers, last time I checked it was a real pain to get them to 
work and they don't support all cards.
(For the record I'm running ATI cards(7500 and 9200) these days but I don't 
have any problems using nvidia cards. None of which are on laptops though...)


> it should have no shared 
> memory and a good display; I wouldn't take one with a resolution lower than
> 1280x1024, I chose one with a resolution of 1600x1200. Regarding the sound
> chip they're all more or less the same (anybody with another experience?).

This is interesting, I guess you are running the chips with ac97 compatibility 
drivers? 
I've always thought ac97 cards where badly functioning, perhaps times have 
changed. Good to know.

> Usually and surprisingly (at least to me) sufficient for low latency
> output, but for quality you will buy an external sound device. And instead
> of having the best, fastest, overkilling CPU I would better spend that
> money in RAM (at least 512MB, better more).

Fan noise, which is very much releated to the CPU power is also something to 
think about. Some laptops are noisy to the point that they are unusable for 
audio-work (or just about anything).

/Robert

>
> Best regards
> Christian