[LAU] Fedora 12 & CCRMA

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 21:59 -0400, Rick Green wrote:
> On Wed, 19 May 2010, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> 
>   (re: udev update for raw1394 permissions)
> > Does it work correctly for you? If so, I could add this to the Planet
> > CCRMA jack package.
> 
>   Yes, I installed it just as S C Rigler suggested, and after a reboot, the 
> raw1394 device was available to the 'audio' group, and I could launch jack 
> with the firewire driver.
>    This, however, is dependent on my being a member of the audio group.  I 
> did that manually a few days ago, to get around another issue I was 
> having.  Looking thru /etc/group now, I see a 'jackuser' group.  Is that 
> one you defined, and is it the 'preferred' group to put users into for 
> pro-audio work?  If so, maybe it would be better to assign /dev/raw1394 to 
> jackuser instead.

No, jackuser is created and used by the Fedora jack package. 

I have always given access to realtime scheduling to all users, so that
you don't need to do anything with group membership (the simplest out of
the box experience). That is, of course, not as secure as having a group
for that purpose (as someone will surely point out), but, well, it is
what I do at CCRMA. Anyone can use jack, anyone can mess up a computer
using it :-)

> In any case, I would suggest adding a section to the 'installing CCRMA on 
> F11 & 12' describing the need to subscribe the user to *some* priviledged 
> group in order to access the specialized hardware.

If you install the Planet CCRMA package for jack there is no need to do
that. 

> I would also suggest moving the section on the RT kernel up higher, as the 
> first item after adding the CCRMA repositories, before even thinking about 
> playing with applications.

It _was_ higher :-)
Sigh. 
It is difficult to know what is best to do. There is no recipe that will
work best for everyone. 

In the past there was more chance that the Planet CCRMA kernel would not
work in a machine where the Fedora kernel would - I think that chance is
lower these days as I can roll out rt kernels that have almost the same
patches as the Fedora ones. And for a big chunk of users the current
Fedora kernels are "good enough" (it depends on the kind of work you
do). So I decided to lower the priority of installing and testing the
realtime kernel. 

I should make it more clear that it is best to install the Planet CCRMA
jack package...

Or, the permissions could be handled through a different package that is
installed independently of jack. 

-- Fernando