2006/7/11, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com>om>: First I recommend gentoo, its nice, its cool, you don't install things you don't need. Second: If you have a 64bit processor you definitly want to make use of it. Most apps nowadays calculate with double-numbers. these run a lot faster on 64bit. And gentoo has a very good 32bit chain for everything that needs it (flash and other bin-only-apps), so there is no need to worry. Arnold -- visit http://dillenburg.dyndns.org/~arnold/ --- Wenn man mit Raubkopien Bands wie Brosis oder Britney Spears wirklich verhindern könnte, würde ich mir noch heute einen Stapel Brenner und einen Sack Rohlinge kaufen.

2006/7/11, Paul Davis <paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com>om>: Well, I _know_ that 64bit is faster: Here at work I have dual-Xeon's with 2.8GHz, my laptop is a Turion64 with 1.8GHz. The same computation (evaluating scientific data from time-of-flight/lifetime experiments) on the same data-files is significant slower on the work-pc's (almost factor 2). As my threads are one thread for computation and others for loading and saving the data, it is really a comparison of two single processors, where the faster one does even the IO-work itself... We will switch to 64bit here at work the next time we buy computers because they _are_ faster. (even more as we are starting a project with amd :-) ) Have a nice day, Arnold -- visit http://dillenburg.dyndns.org/~arnold/ --- Wenn man mit Raubkopien Bands wie Brosis oder Britney Spears wirklich verhindern könnte, würde ich mir noch heute einen Stapel Brenner und einen Sack Rohlinge kaufen.

Dave, Very sorry for the late reply. I'm an ungrately lout for sure. ;-) On 7/11/06, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com> wrote: Being ATA100 it's not the fastest drive out there but 400GB is certainly nice storage. QUESTION: Are you going with a single drive or will there be separate system and audio drives? OK, here goes the tough stuff. Gentoo is great. I run it on all my systems now. That said it is a STEEP learning curve and will likely take you 3-5 days to bring it up and get it to run Ardour for the first time if you've never done it before. I just rebuilt my son's machine - an AMD Athlon 2000+. It took the better part of two days before he could use it. NOTE: It is NOT that the Gentoo install is all that difficult. It just takes a lot of time to build everything. I do not use the new installer. I do it all by hand. Maybe the installer works and gets it done fast. I don't know. Anyway, be prepared for a long slog your first time through. In fact, if you have a junk machine sitting around I would STRONGLY recommend building Gentoo on it, getting it running, and then sending it back to the junk pile just to get the experience before you strt working on a machine you really care able, but that's just me. After Gentoo is built the big advantage is you never have to 'upgrade'. You just continually 'update' programs to keep the current. I have a couple of machines I haven't touched in 2 years now and they ae as up to date as anything you would build today on the same hardware. I like that but many people do not. Thee are issue with Gentoo, like slotting, that continue to frustrate me, but I think I'm not such an IT guy to be good at that. Hope this helps even a little. cheers, Mark

On 7/12/06, carmen <_(a)whats-your.name> wrote: Sure, and I can build fluxbox in about 10 minutes and X is up and running. What I really mean is to get everything set up and really going will, in my experience, take at least one full day and probably much more for folks that are unexperience. I was emerging xine, Gnome-light and some other big stuff. It takes time. Add to that process that you will almost certainly build one kernel to boot the machine, then an emerge world will pull in another one, or at least for an audio guy you'll want to add the pro-audio overlay and build a -rt kernel, and there is another hour gone by before you've rebooted and have it going. I admit that a big part of my 2-day process on my son's conversion was problems with getting ndiswrapper & wireless support working correctly. That was about 1/2 right there so subtract that from my previous numbers. Anyway, the point is, for Dave anyway, that a binary distro will be up and running in a couple of hours. Gentoo will take much more time, but I beleive you save huge amounts of time in the long run with Gentoo so I'm cool with that. Hey - no reason for us to argue here. We BOTH like Gentoo!! :) Sounds like a good trick as long as the old junker isn't too noisy. Yeah - I just consider that part of the update process, or even just maintainance process. It's far easier than doing the fc2->fc3->fc4-fc5 tango... My main reason is that it has been, by far, the most stable distro I've run. I have 3 machines at my parents house. My dad is 78 (yes, I'm over 50!) and he's run Gentoo for nearly 3 years now with very few problems. (Mainly browsers and MythTV) My mom uses Gentoo now after getting sick of Windows pop ups. My wife loves it. My kid wants Windows (for Games) but too bad. The only windows boxen I have is in my studio so he comes in here to play a game once in awhile and I know he's not defocused in his bedroom playing games. Gentoo, and indeed all Linux ==== good. - Mark

On 7/17/06, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com> wrote: Yes. That's the idea. /dev/hdaX would hold Linux on multiple partitions. (root swap boot, etc.) /dev/hdc would be one large partition for nothing but the audio files and supporting stuff. (Complete Ardour song directories, etc.) Extra power from the power supply so don't skimp on that. Extra space in the case if you go internal. 1394 adapter, if one isn't built in to your motherboard, if you decide to go external. IF you buy a 1394 adapter then try for 1394b instead of 1394a. I'm not sure it's necessary if you have enough RAM in your machine and you don't do anything other than Ardour when doing Ardour, etc. However, if you are recording with Ardour and running other apps at the same time that are accessing the drive, then for brief periods you will have apps seeking to different places on the drive and potentially causing problems. One thing might be to go with a single drive and buy the second if you decide it will solve some problem you run into later. Yeah, big choice. I'm cursing Gentoo this weekend as I try to make a more than major upgrade to my home network of MythTV boxes. I've been at that 2 days now... sounds exciting. Good luck! - Mark

I have no problem with this recommendation from Thomas. I've not used eSATA ut I expect it' performance it pretty good. I know nothing about the implementation team for that technology. There doesn't seem to be much happening with 1394 development these days. I use it because I have the drives and have industry experience, not because it's the best technology. Do some searching around on your own and figure out what works for you. An internal drive is goig to be the least painful from a Linux POV. If you have no need to move your sessions around to different locations then I wouldn't bother with any external drive based on my personal Linux experience. - Mark On 7/17/06, Thomas Ilnseher <illth(a)gmx.de> wrote:

Just for reference, most PC motherboards these days STILL only come with 1394a connectors(Firewire400). If you were using it for an external HD or RAID I would definitely recommend 1394b(Firewire800) But like Mark I have seen no problem against eSATA, I just haven't used it myself to comment on it, but technically that SHOULD be better than Firewire for storage I believe. Again though, haven't used it so I cant really comment on it. Seablade

Yep completely correct, it is just when I am doing work I tend to go over that track count on my internal so I switch to external and go with b at that point to make sure I have room. My internal at the moment also has my OS on it though so most of the time you will get better performance out of a dedicated internal drive, for the record;) interfaces also so you can use it with the built in connector for now and go to 1394b later if desired. I have found the LaCie Triple Interface good drives for this purpose myself, then again I also know people that hate them as well, so YMWV. Seablade

Le 17 Jul à 10:40, Dave Phillips ecrivait: I have a drive exclusively for Ardour when I use it, with a single partition. Soundfonts and samples are on the main drive, in my home directory, and I record on the other drive. Also neither Qsynth nor linuxsampler, for example, may access the drive I'm recording on. I have sda1 for the system (14 Gb), sda4 for my home (the rest of sda), and sdb1, a single partition on the whole second disk, for Ardour (and storage or backups eventually). I mount it on /data. And I' m very confortable with ext3 ; after years using reiserfs, I realized quickly that it's not very handy for audio. Finally, as they are SATA disks, each disk is alone on its cable. This is very important, maybe even more with IDE drives. HTH, Y.