[LAU] Linuxaudio from live usb

[Len Ovens]

On Thu, April 11, 2013 2:15 am, Florian Paul Schmidt wrote:
> On 04/11/2013 10:50 AM, rosea.grammostola wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Is it possible to boot an linuxaudio distro from live usb and work
>> with JACK, Ardour etc.? How good or bad will the performance be? For
>> example for giving a workshop about Linuxaudio on Windows computers?
>>
>
> Totally possible. The perfomance will vary with the tasks you are doing.
> Recording 32 tracks of 48000hz audio in ardour to a USB thumbdrive might
> not work so well. Running softsynths and some other apps that do not
> rely heavily on disk streaming should work fine..
>
> You might also want to consider to INSTALL a linux distro to the USB
> stick instead of just booting some live image. This way you can setup
> stuff..

I have found an Install on a USB stick really really slow. Better to run
from the live ISO on a USB stick. Writes to a USB stick are about 1/8 the
speed of reads. I have used a USB drive (real hard drive) and been very
happy with it, but when I got a USB stick to install to... well try it. A
32G USB stick is $15 at Walmart these days. Mounting noatime may help
some, but I was so disappointed I didn't try. The install itself was
arduous already. I then did some research and there are faster USB sticks,
but not that much faster, maybe double write speed.

Running from a live USB of course takes up some of your memory as a ram
drive (much better performance) so there is less system ram left for
software to use. In a class situation... one needs to know how much memory
they have to begin with. Depending which live ISO you use it may be
possible to mount the windows drive for temporary use. The least intrusive
method being to drop a large file one there that can be mounted as a linux
partition (ext* file system). This can be backed up to the USB stick at
the end of the day.

Anyway, I would not agree to lead a class in this way until I had made a
USB stick up and tried it on their machines to make sure I was able to
cover the class material I intended to cover.


-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net