Well I decided to try again to bring my 64-bit Intel Micro-ITX board alive, running
64studio and Ardour, to use as an alternate DAW machine at a friend's studio. I gave
up trying to make a headless softsynth out of it, because it wouldn't boot off of a
USB flash drive. Now that I have the Atom-based EEE, that's working out rather well as
a portable softsynth, so I'm trying to find another use for the Micro-ITX since
it's been sitting around unused for many mohths.
The studio has two Digidesign Firewire audio interfaces there, one with 4 inputs and one
with 8. I'd ultimately like to have them both running, sync'ed up, for 12 tracks
of audio.
Problem is, 64studio 2.1 seems to have an ancient version of FreeBoB (no FFADO) and an
even more ancient version of JACKD (0.103.0, the same one I've been running for two
years now on my laptop).
Just for grins, I tried to hook up the Digi Firewire box, but jackd said "Root node
has no children!" over and over again, then SIGSEGV'ed. Oh well. gscanbus showed
the firewire interface just fine, and the binary package of FreeBoB doesn't seem to
include the "test-freebob" script and tools.
I dunno. Should I go with Sid? Or do any of the other Debian-derived audio distros support
FFADO right now?
I was hoping to show off how easily a 1.6Ghz 64-bit machine could record 12 tracks of
audio with low latency using Linux. Alas, the knock-yer-socks-off Linux demo might have to
wait a while.
-ken