Also, if you are using KDE,
Mandrake has this stupid idea of renicing X to -10, which makes the
mm kernel very stop-and-go. Adjust the -n level to 0 in
/etc/X11/xdm/Xservers. If you're using gdm (as all sane people
do), you don't have to worry, X is not reniced by gdm.
Thanks Austin! This tip has solved a long-running Audacity 'bug' for
me, which I couldn't figure out. I wasn't seeing it on my
gdm/blackbox studio machine, but my kdm/kde/blackbox office machine
was always affected, no matter which IRQ the soundcard was on or how
many different builds of Audacity I tried. Both were running
otherwise similar Mandrake 9.1 installations.
For the record, with n set to -10 I got consistent skip-forwards of
the Audacity cursor during playback, whenever I moved the mouse.
That's why I was thinking it was an IRQ problem, but it persisted
even with optimised IRQs (10 for the soundcard, 11 for the network
card, 12 for the mouse.)
I was able to replicate this on two very different hardware machines
running kdm, so other Mandrake 9.1/Audacity users must have been
affected. I'll post the fix to the Audacity lists.
Cheers!
Daniel