[LAU] Question about fitting all this MIDI music stuff together

I have a laptop with the Intel integrated audio, which lacks any form of hardware MIDI synthesizer, so I use fluidsynth. I use Rosegarden for my sequencer. I just got an E-Mu 1x1 USB<>MIDI cable to hook in my Yamaha keyboard. Let me see if I've got this whole thing straight. Keyboard talks to Rosegarden. Rosegarden talks to fluidsynth (and to the keyboard, if I want). Fluidsynth talks to JACK, JACK talks to ALSA, ALSA drives the sound hardware. So I play something on the keyboard, it bounces through the above chain (with of course the manual step of playing the composition from Rosegarden if I'm using Rosegarden), and sound burbles joyously from the laptop sound output. Yes? Then, also, I can have other programs (like PD, CSound, amsynth, ALSA Modular Synth, Audacity, etc) hook into this chain somewhere, too? Do I connect everything together using JACK? I'm asking all this because my present music setup on the laptop is sort of hodgepodged together - somehow it works, but I'm not sure how, or if it's even working the best way it could be. I'm not planning to switch distros, boring Debian testing works for the vast majority of my needs (music writing is a smallish part of that). Later, I'll tackle setup/configuration of the desktop computer, which has more horsepower and a real sound card, and perhaps set that one up with an audio-focussed distro. But for now, just focusing on the laptop. Thanks. IIRC, I also owe Julien some song lyrics, too - sorry, Julien, it's on the to do list! -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community