On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 07:30:27PM +0100, Chris Cannam wrote: Do they have a ready-to-use RT kernel ? Ciao, -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

On Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:49:33 +0200 Fons Adriaensen <fons(a)kokkinizita.net> wrote: There is a buildscript for one as well as a separate binary repository including a binary rt kernel. Currently it's already .31-rt that's being tested. I do have consolekit here tough. The beauty of Arch Linux is: - Emphasis on simplicity, don't hide how stuff works, etc. see: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way - The base system is minimal - Official binary repositories are available, including most popular applications - Applications in the repositories are very recent versions due to a rolling release model - Everything in the official repositories can be rebuilt easily, using the same scripts that were used to build the official package (ABS). Very useful if you want to have other compiletime options or do optimisations (everything is compiled for i686/x86_64 by default). - Almost anything that's not in the official repositories can be found in a user maintained buildscript repository (AUR). - There's a growing external buildscript/binary repository for audio applications (archaudio.org) Sure there are drawbacks - Arch patches as little as possible, there are no security updates unless upstream fixes it and provides a new version - Rolling release model can break stuff - very recent versions of software can break stuff I hope I didn't forget anything important. The arch wiki is an o.k. resource to get an overview and general information, or just ask here or on an Arch Linux mailinglist. Regards, Philipp

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:15:36 +0800 Ray Rashif <schivmeister(a)gmail.com> wrote: Oh, yeah, this brings me to a point that I forgot to mention previously: The package management tool, pacman, is really just that. It doesn't do any system administration for you, you have to do that yourself. This is mainly merging of config files and somesuch, it hasn't been a lot of trouble for me so far. For really big changes that affect many there's some advisory on the website and on some ML, but that's it, so it's a good idea to check that before doing updates. About the rt kernels: We don't have as much experience as Fernando, so the rt kernels are probably not as tuned yet, but since it's trivial to make config changes and compile/install kernels that could change quickly. The current rt kernels are based on the vanilla kernels and unpatched (except for some ATI graphics compatibility), which is a little plus I guess. Well, that's all I can think of for now. Hope that helps, Philipp

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 07:30:27PM +0100, Chris Cannam wrote: First of all (a late) thanks to all who responded. Today I installed ArchLinux on a spare box, and it went very well. It took me around 1/3 of the time (compared to a previous F11 install) to get the machine how I wanted it. I just had to adapt to having to install things I wanted rather than having to remove or modify those I didn't want. and the hard disk footprint is a fraction of what I'm used to. There's only only problem I've not been able to fix: when using apps that frequently update pixmaps or send Ximages, the mouse pointer gets corrupted with that data. It happens with Ardour, jkmeter, japa, and others. No idea where to start... Driver is the 'ati' module, probably it needs some parameters. Ciao, -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.

On October 12, 2009 01:14:01 pm Fons Adriaensen wrote: Just another one of the usual X problems at install time. More information needed to drill down to the root of the problem. Both ATI (and NVidia) have some components in their own proprietary drivers for X11 that are not supported 100% in the Xorg versions. Which version are you using? Which ATI model? Older vs.newer hardware having better support in one or the other driver version. Have you used this hardware with X before and have an Xorg.conf for it somewhere (or remember the setup)? Since X is pretty modular now, you could have a mismatch in one of a number of packages for X, not necessarily the ATI module itself. How about running a Linux live CD/DVD on that system with a distro that does not display this behavior. Once you find one that works correctly, just check the info for what is loaded, running, its Xorg.conf, etc. and replicate it to see if the problem goes away. Regards, -R

2009/10/13 Ray Rashif <schivmeister(a)gmail.com> Oh yeah and always troubleshoot with hotplugging enabled first, i.e no xorg config and yes hal.