[LAU] Best realtime audio dstro for Eee

[Justin Smith]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 2:39 AM, david<gnome at hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
> Raffaele Morelli wrote:
>> 2009/6/30 Norval Watson <norv2001 at yahoo.com.au>:
>>> Hi y'all,
>>> I want to install a realtime audio distro on my new Asus Eee 901.
>>> I need a 2.6.29 realtime kernel or higher to support the hardware on my Eee.
>>> I have got the 2G RAM (haven't swapped it in yet).
>>> AFAIK, options include:
>>> DebianEeePC http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC
>>> ArchLinux http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_Eee_PC_901
>>> Eeebuntu http://www.eeebuntu.org/
>>> Indamixx USB stick, when it's available, (and it's not free)
>>>
>>> I have been using Debian unstable for some years so I'm most familiar with that.
>>> Any suggestions welcome, particularly regarding optimizing the kernel.
>>> TIA
>>> Norv
>>
>>
>> Debian testing here, 2.6.29.5-rt22, ASUS Mobo (don't remember exatly
>> what model... I am at work now)
>>
>> Optimizing the kernel? ... it depends from your hardware but, apart
>> from binary size, I can not really say if turning off wireless stuffs
>> from kernel config could improve RT performances. I am sure somebody
>> else can comment bettere on this.
>
> I'm slowly turning my wife's old laptop (2.8GHz Celeron, 768MB RAM,
> saddled with older Intel chipset) into a synthesizer/effects box. It
> currently has Ubuntu Studio on it. While I have the wireless antenna
> turned off (we have no wireless network around here), I've never
> disabled the wifi kernel modules or drivers. And it runs along quite
> happily at latencies between 5-10 msec using an external USB audio
> interface ...
>
> I seem to recall that the problem with wifi wasn't the presence of the
> drivers, it was the fact that the system was incessantly trying to make
> a wifi connection. Maybe that's something Network Manager does that
> doing your networking using command line stuff doesn't?
>
> --
> David
> gnome at hawaii.rr.com
> authenticity, honesty, community
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> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>

Yeah, there is a command line utility that searches for wireless
access points and lists their respective signal strength etc.
(iwlist), and I only run it if I think an access point should be there
and I am not finding it or getting a poor connection.

It seems like networkmanager runs iwlist or does some equivalent on a
frequent basis (even if it already has a wifi connection), and uses
quite a bit of CPU doing it. I no longer need to worry about this
since switching to debian, where the /etc/network/interfaces config
file plus the ifup/ifdown commands that reference that configuration
have served me just fine.