On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 09:59 -0400, Bill Allen wrote:
  Hi,
 On my laptop, I'm running ubuntu dapper. Using the 2.15.18 kernel, all my audio
applications work great OOTB. Very few xruns. With the latest two kernels (2.15.19 and
2.15.20), when I start jack using qjackctl, it immediately starts reporting xruns at the
rate of about 10 per second - and this is with no applications running at all. I'm not
sure about how to go about debugging this.
 Any ideas? 
It's possible that they used to use realtime-lsm and recently switched
to the rlimit approach (although, shouldn't JACK bomb out if started
with -R and realtime scheduling is unavailable, rather than failing
silently?).
Try adding this to the end of /etc/security/limits.conf:
*               rtprio  hard    99
*               nice    hard    -20
Then reboot and try it again.
If it still fails please post the JACK output
Lee