[LAU] light weight, full featured desktop for audio

With all the talk about minimal DE installs, and reading about the problems with different kernels and video cards... and what things cause xruns. I thought of a solution that may work well. Here is my minimal DE through the eyes of ps: joet@music:~$ ps x PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 3784 ? S 0:00 sshd: joet@pts/0 3785 pts/0 Ss 0:00 -bash 3886 pts/0 S 0:03 xfce4-panel 3890 pts/0 S 0:00 dbus-launch --autolaunch cc2b7c64cc6292515b70bed80000 3891 ? Ss 0:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-addres 3893 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/xfce4/xfconf/xfconfd 3909 pts/0 R+ 0:00 ps x ---------------------------------------------------------------- Yup, 6 things. The idea is to use two computers. Some of the mini atom MBs would easily fit two in one case and still use no fans and one PS. They all have Gb networking, so a small switch between them is all that is needed. This assumes a single audio card with enough channels for whatever you are doing, either pci, USB or (with a pci(e) FW card) FW. One computer is headless and never runs X, though it would have most of the x libs anyway. All of the audio SW would be installed on this machine. I only used xfce4-panel because it was already there (it's running ubuntustudio in real life sitting at the login screen). The panel has been cleared of all applets except for the main menu and shrunk to fit. I am not sure if this is enough, some people may need a systray as well. The panel seems to launch dbus for me too (good). The main thing is that it gives me a menu for that machine where the apps it launches all inherit the same dbus info and display. An ncurses based menu could work just as well. and there are other panels or docks which would also work. The second computer can run any linux or BSD or anything else so long as it has an xserver (even windows I think can have an xserver). It does not matter what video card you use, because you can run a generic kernel that the driver is made to run on. You don't have to think about interrupts or anything like that. Pulse run on this machine will not affect jack in any way. Rather than bother with figuring out a pulse-jack bridge, connect line out from the head board to the line of the audio board and vise versa and use zita-a2j and zita-j2a to add them to jack. My machines are not the best trial. I am using wireless networking (b version with max 11M, but most often less) but even with 100M there is some lag, though it doesn't effect the audio at all. Gb net would probably be good enough though. affects latency? yup. jack running -p16 -r 48000, guitarix on top. very few Xruns, with the DE on the same machine I had 1000s/minute. No mouse/kb irqs, no video irqs, Makes this old P4/2.4G sing. I'll have to try dual heading the gui box (aspire one netbook). So far I think this is a better solution than running the audio across the net. -- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net