Re: [LAU] A short story: from zero to recording the drums in a budget

I feel awkward giving advice to a knowledged dsp programmer, but maybe this will help you. I have an old desktop with a celeron 440 2GHz CPU, and 1GB of RAM (which run on 512MB for a month before the upgrade) which performs quite good after doing the following: Replace systemd with something lighter, like minirc https://github.com/hut/minirc It might be painful depending on what services you run on startup. If you stick to defaults, you're mostly covered. Of course you can't load any extra services, but if you use http://dwm.suckless.org/ you're cutting a lot. I've once compiled X myself and it worked better and was softer on memory, but I don't have benchmarks. Also, disable unused ttys. dwm is extremely handy to me. It's got 3 default view modes, monocle (apps cover whole screen), tile, and floating. All of this under 2000 lines of C code. With patches you get almost any thinkable split mode. The key bindings are vi-based so it's easy to learn them if you used the editor. Everything is customizable before compiling. I should mention that I also custom config my kernels and strip any foreign thing. That makes my atom N270 netbook use 90mb of ram before starting X (which I do through xinit with an .xinitrc). I don't think one can go further than this without cutting needed functionality. But I'm sure qtractor would run on your P4 this way. Bye!