[linux-audio-user] Uhm, low latency?

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

> Question to Fernando: thanks for the Planet CCRMA project, I've tried out some 
> rpm's in my tests partition with mandrake. 

Hmmm, for Mandrake 9.0 you would be much better off using Thac's RPMS
for Mandrake 9.0 at http://rpm.nyvalls.se/sound9.0.html or Turn-Key
Linux Audio at
http://lulu.esm.rochester.edu/kevine/turnkey/home.html

The Planet CCRMA rpms have been compiled under RedHat, they might or
might not run fine under Mandrake (I have not tried). Unless you rebuild
from the source rpms, of course, and even you may hit compatibility
problems with the naming of explicit package dependencies. 

> But what's the difference between 
> CCRMA and the soon-to-be-released (maybe) RehMuDi? Aren't them more or less 
> the same thing? As far as I know DeMuDi (debian version) and RehMuDi (redhat 
> version) have lowlatency kernels together with the same large deal of 
> multimedia software.

RehMuDi's goal (same as the original DeMuDI) is to be a distribution.
The current beta 2 version is built on top of RedHat 7.3. Planet CCRMA
is added to an already installed RedHat 7.2, 7.3 or 8.0 distribution (it
starts where the RedHat install stops), and uses apt for rpm (originally
ported by Conectiva - same functionality as the original debian apt
package) to manage the original installs and subsequent updates (apt is
not part of the regular RedHat releases). Both approaches have
advantages and disadvantages, but the end result is hopefully pretty
much the same (low latency kernel, alsa drivers, tons of up-to-date neat
applications to play with). They do share a lot of packages, in fact the
current RehMuDi beta uses the Planet CCRMA low latency kernel as well as
a bunch of other Planet CCRMA source packages.

The origins of the two projects are different. RehMuDI is the RedHat
based version of AGNULA, a two year project funded by the European
Economic Community (and an expansion of the original debian based DeMuDi
project). Planet CCRMA was originally conceived as a way to give our
students / faculty / staff a chance to install the already existing
CCRMA linux based sound and music environment in their pc's, in much the
same way Turn-Key Linux Audio does for Mandrake users at ECMC. Planet
CCRMA was first "officially" released in September 14th, 2001 with an
internal announcement at CCRMA (but the name itself predates the public
package collection, I "borrowed" it from Juan Reyes' very helpful guide
to the CCRMA Linux world of the same name, which became available to
ccrmalites on July 2001). The original release did not use apt, apt
support and the accompaining public repository were added at the end of
2001 - that finally made it _really_ easy to install and mantain. Most
of the original packages supported, at that time, oss, alsa 0.5 and 0.9
drivers! The actual environment it mirrors (linux based music/audio
workstations being used for daily work at CCRMA) predates the initial
public release of Planet CCRMA by a long time, I've been mantaining
linux around here since the end of '96 or so... well, hmmm, maybe at
that time it was not _that_ usable :-) Sorry for the historical
disgression :-)

-- Fernando