20 Nov
2008
20 Nov
'08
10:28 a.m.
Greetings, fellow LAUyers,
To recap: I recently purchased a Hewlett-Packard G60-125NR notebook, a
machine based on an AMD Turion 2 GHz CPU, with 3G RAM, a 250G hard disk,
and an on-board nVidia 8200M (essential for my work). Sound comes from
an nVidia chipset based on the dreaded Intel HDA codec.
My experience so far has been illuminating. I first tried to install the
64-bit versions Ubuntu 8.10 and Arch Linux, both of which froze during
the installation procedure. Some research indicated that the likely
culprit was the Atheros wifi driver, so I tried the brokenmodules option
but still got no joy. I found reports that Mandriva and OpenSUSE 11.0
worked, and since OpenSUSE downloaded faster I gave it a whirl. The
brokenmodules option seemed to do the trick, and after a while I had a
new Open SUSE 11.0 (64-bit) installed on the machine. Alas, I couldn't
get the official nVidia driver to work, which left me with an
unsatisfactory vesa framebuffer display. A little more Googling revealed
that indeed some users were enjoying Ubuntu 8.10 on this hardware, so I
tried again, this time with the i386 installer. Voila, in short order I
had a new Ubuntu system installed, with working 3D acceleration from the
nVidia closed-soure driver.
On to the audio. Intrepid doesn't create an audio group by default, so I
had to do the dance to add that group and myself to its users. That got
me to realtime JACK performance, though I'm still suffering excessive
xruns at 17.4 ms latency (-p 256 -n 3 -r 44100). I don't plan to use
that chipset as a primary audio interface anyway (I'm in the market for
a USB interface now), so for the present time I'll live with it. Btw,
the audio device is on IRQ 19, probably not the optimal position.
I have one more permissions problem to resolve (access to /dev/nvidiactl
is forbidden to the normal user) then I believe I'll have my target
machine, i.e. a portable box that can run AVSynthesis (OpenGL + Csound).
Btw, I've already scrapped the GNOME desktop in favor of fluxbox (of
course), but I'd certainly like to hear from other Ubuntu users
regarding any other recommended streamlining. For instance, I'd like to
junk pulseaudio and compiz completely but I'm not sure how to do it.
One question: Should I go ahead and install the UbuntuStudio packages ?
I have the rt-kernel, it seems I could just go ahead and install the
rest. Any reasons not to do so ?
Best,
dp
20 Nov
20 Nov
10:38 a.m.
Hey Dave,
Sounds like you're making pretty good progress. Congrats You'll
have to report back some benchmark values when you get it set up to
your liking.
I cannot speak to Ubuntu. I've never run it. However I've run
Gentoo 64-bit for a few years now. All I can say is that while 64-bit
Linux works, and works well, there are a lot of real world limitations
in terms of accessing media from the web. While no where near as bad
as they used to be you will likely run into issues with Java and Flash
under 64-bit, and the decoders for things like Windows media file
types are almost always a bit more difficult than on our 32-bit
machines. Again, no where near as bad as they used to be, but not as
good as the 32-bit versions.
Even though I'm purchasing 64-bit processors these days I'm not
installing 64-bit anymore. I have one machine to test but 32-bit the
rest of the way around. There's nothing about your system specs that
demands 64-bit (IMO) so consider whether you really want it.
Cheers,
Mark
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:28 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com> wrote:
12:21 p.m.
BTW - I'm not suggesting only installing a single distro. you have
enough disk space to install a few and try out support for the machine
in each, just to see how it goes. Ain't grub grand? ;-)
- Mark
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:38 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht(a)gmail.com> wrote:
6:36 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 08:21:00AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
On a related note: is it possible to have a (fedora) system
without any of the ****Kit junk from Freedesktop ? As far as
I can see none of these are essential - they are either doing
things that I perfectly live without (such as trying to manage
my 'seats') or trying to replace the functionality of other
modules, e.g. udev. Previous systems worked perfectly without
them. Yet for example 'yum remove ConsoleKit' lists around 150
dependent packages...
Ciao,
--
FA
Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica
Parma, Italia
Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa.
12:50 p.m.
flash works fine under 64bit now. althoua stlil freezes opera like the 32bit ver has for
ages
its ben _years_ since a codec didnt work for me out of the box on _Debian_ which is known
to not install anything with dubious patent stuff. in other words, whatever
divx/xcvid/x264 crap it has plays anbything ive run across.
also the nonsense with the staggered NvidiaATI rlease schedules usually meaning your
kenrle must be 0.0.2 behind the latest which means some other piece of new hardware on
your new machine doesnt work because it wasnt in that kernel, is why id never get a
NvidiaATI based notebook after enduring 3 years of atht hell.
compiz working out of the box on the latest linus release and linux-next on
montevina/x40500 was real nice...
sorrh, delete is sending ctrl-h bringing up emacs help. thus the typos
12:55 p.m.
Mark Knecht wrote:
I sorted out the permissions problems, AVSynthesis now takes full
advantage of the nVidia driver. I also built and installed an up-to-date
Csound 5.09 with some extra bells & whistles. Setting up the build
environment was easy, Ubuntu uses the apt package management system,
including the Synaptic GUI.
The main box here is a 64 Studio system, pure 64-bits. Its main musical
function is Ardour, which runs very nicely on it. I also use it for
teaching purposes, running Audacity and a few other apps. Most of my
composition work is done on the 32-bit machine.
I'm still interested in testing Arch, but for a while I'm going to tune
Ubuntu. The xruns are bad, and according to at least one report they
shouldn't be this bad. So, back to the grindstone...
Best,
dp
1:02 p.m.
I'm still interested in testing Arch, but for a while I'm going to tune
Ubuntu. The xruns are bad, and according to at least one report they
shouldn't be this bad. So, back to the grindstone...
Hi
I am running Archlinux 64bits and it works fine for me. It's a fresh
install, so I am actually compiling an rt kernel. But it should be ok...
cheers,
Mysth-R
--
*
***************************************************************************************
* {^_^} Mysth-R {^_^}
* <= Aide Auditive =>
*
* http://myspace.com/mysthr
* http://myspace.com/aideauditive
* http://mysthr.free.fr/Joomla => Site dédié à l'audio sous
Fedora/PlanetCCRMA.
*
***************************************************************************************
21 Nov
21 Nov
3:22 a.m.
Quoting Mark Knecht <markknecht(a)gmail.com>om>:
All I can say is that while 64-bit
Adobe has just released a 64bit beta of flash 10 for linux:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
And with the latest releases of mplayer/ffmpeg it very rare to having
to resort to binary-only (32bit) codecs. The only times I've had to
use them were some realplayer10 file, and as for wmv the only
unplayable ones I've encountered are the DRM:ed ones and I don't think
they can be played in linux whatsoever.
- Peder (who speaks out of his ass since he doesn't even run 64bit)
11:45 a.m.
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:21 PM, Peder Hedlund <peder(a)musikhuset.org> wrote:
My real point is that after running 64-bit Gentoo for 4 years I can
still see no *advantage* (and really only disadvantages) to running
64-bit Linux for a DAW platform. Certainly there are FAR fewer
disadvantages today than a few years ago, and that's good, but arguing
for the simplest solution would suggest Dave would be mildly better
off running 32-bit. There are no applications that I know of that
demand 64-bit processing. Dave's machine doesn't currently have more
than 4GB of DRAM and I suspect his chipset doesn't even support it.
All of the processor features are supported equally, if not better, in
32-bit. With that in mind I simply raised the point of view. Of course
I'm interested in finding out how 64-bit Linux makes my life better. I
just haven't found them myself.
Again, I run 64-bit on one of my machines and after all this time when
I'm given new 64-bit hardware I grab a 32-bit OS install disk, but
that's just me.
Cheers,
Mark
10:27 p.m.
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 2:21 AM, Peder Hedlund <peder(a)musikhuset.org> wrote:
Actually I've found 64 bit Ubuntu 8.10 with 32 bit Flash 10 plugin via
nspluginwrapper to be the best Linux Flash setup. If Flash crashes,
rather than taking out the whole browser as a native plugin (32 or 64
bit) would, only the crashing instance dies. With this setup on 8.04,
all Flash applets would die if one crashed.
It's still not great, as Flash regularly pegs one core at 100% CPU
requiring the offending npviewer.bin process to be killed, but at
least the browser survives.
Lee
10:41 p.m.
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Lee Revell <rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> wrote:
Lee,
Do you really feel that the Flash/nspluginwrapper setup you
describe above, which is pretty much equivalent to what I'm running on
Gentoo, is *better* than the same version of Flash running on a 32-bit
platform with the same browser/kernel/desktop?
The key here, in my mind, is basically an argument for KISS. If
64-bit isn't demonstratabely better then why should Dave run it?
(Other than he just want's to which is a fine reason!)
This argument has to also be extended to all the other software
that makes the user experience go - Java, Java within browsers, Wine,
VST's, etc.
I'm not saying 64-bit doesn't work. I'm typing this message on a
64-bit machine and this specific box has never run anything except
64-bit Gentoo so I know it works. I simply feel that it doesn't work
*better*. At BEST it's equivalent, and in my experience it's always
somewhat behind for a desktop/DAW type machine.
Thanks,
Mark
11:13 p.m.
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 9:41 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, but only for flash support, due to the isolation of flash in a
separate process with nspluginwrapper. But this should be a minor
issue on an audio box.
Overall I can't really say. Try both I guess. I've found other
issues like nvidia vs. ati graphics to be much more of an issue than
32 vs 64 bit.
Lee
20 Nov
20 Nov
4:53 p.m.
Dave Phillips schreef:
All UbuntuStudio packages are in the regular distribution as well, I
think. The intrepid rt-kernel does not work on my machine.
Compiz is not used by default, I think, certainly not in fluxbox. You
can safely remove it. About junking pulseaudio: that's exactly what I
did, without any harm. On the whole I'm not that satisfied with Intrepid
and for now I keep Hardy on my laptop.
Keep an eye on http://www.getdeb.net/ for the most up-to-date packages.
m.
5989
days inactive
5990
days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
12 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
carmen -
Dave Phillips -
Fons Adriaensen -
Lee Revell -
Mark Knecht -
mik -
Mysth-R -
Peder Hedlund