[linux-audio-user] More Mandrake 9.2 fine tuning...Dell latitude live fx box

[Robert Jonsson]

Hi,

On Monday 09 February 2004 20.06, Chris Pickett wrote:
> >  I am still unable to run Jack at anything less than 1024 without having
> > Xrun hell. I set the HD to DMA "on" I had apm as opposed to acpi
> > running...turned it off and found no difference.
>
> Check that your CPU speed is not getting screwed up by the power
> management (i.e. you have the full 650 MHz).  I don't know if it's even
> a problem for Dell laptops, but it was/is for certain Thinkpads.
>
> > I notice that running Ardour (Beta .9beta 9 RPM from Thacs RPMs), after
> > I have fired up Jackstart or Jackd-realtime from Qjackctl with -d alsa
> > hw:0 1024 2 as root and then fire up  Ardour and add a track, the pcm
> > chain is connected (also visible in Qjackctl "Connect")and I have sound
> > but the pc starts running slow and the Hard drive light is constantly
> > on. I'm not recording anything...is this Jack writing to disc? I only
> > have 128 megs in this machine...
>
> It's worth maxing out the RAM in your laptop.  I have a Thinkpad with
> similar specs, and I found upgrading from 128 to 384 Mb RAM made a huge
> difference in performance.  Make sure you get the right kind, or at
> least a compatible kind.  It seems likely that this is the problem; even
> if it isn't, it's still a very worthwhile (and cheap) upgrade.

mmm, 128 is a little on the low side when running X ... possibly there are 
some daemons you could turn of ?

Some alternatives would be:

* Use something a bit more lightweight than Ardour, you mention ecamegapedal, 
did you try anything else? There is a bunch of similar apps. E.g. JackRack. I 
think there are some that don't require jack also... they might give better 
mileage.

* don't run X, would definitely improve on the memory issue. Probably your 
best choice then would be to run ecasound directly (ecamegapedal is a kind of 
wrapper around ecasound). There is a bit of learning curve to understand all 
the features but ecasound is very capable. Jack would not be needed then 
either.

/Robert


>
> Cheers,
> Chris