Regarding RT and ardour, you can run jack and ardour without RT.
Good point. Although I'm not using the -rt kernel anymore, my ubuntu jaunty
(and
intrepid before it) system works very well for audio stuff. I easily run
ardour
and jack and others and they are very stable. I found that I did not need
the
super low latencies (<5ms) from a -rt kernel to do the recording and
playback
that I was doing.
Last time I had a really good -rt kernel was around Gutsy. I did a lot of
tweaking for that also, but it did work very well with the workstation.
Also FWIW I was never impressed with WindowsXP's latency - Stopped using
that
about 2.5 years ago and never could get the latency down low enough for
live
playing using a software synth. So one should not just assume that Windows
will
give you the super low latencies of a -rt kernel.
The best low latency I've ever gotten from my current desktop was using the
64Studio distro a few years ago. But I've never tried the Fedora, Suse,
Mandriva versions so can't comment on these.
Hope this helps someone.
Geoff
Did you try to compile kernel 2.6.29.1 with patch-2.6.29.1-rt7?
As on every debian based distro it is very easy to compile a customized
kernel using kernel-package.
-r