Subject: [linux-audio-user] Whoo-hoo, it (sort-of) works (sorry, it's long)
From: Greg Reddin (gtreddin_AT_yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jul 28 2003 - 18:27:33 EEST
Please forgive me for this brain dump, but I just had to share my
experiences...
As recently as 7 months ago, I'd never used Linux. I had some
exeperience with Unix, but my primary system for work, home, audio,
etc. was Windows 2k. On a whim, I decided to install Linux on a
secondary box at work and give it a try. Within a month I had
installed Linux on all my computers and relegated Windoze to my
secondary box. I still have to use it about once a week to do time
reporting in a web browser that uses ActiveX controls :-(
Anyway, it wasn't long after getting into Linux that I discovered
that an audio revolution is on the verge of taking place. So I've
spent the last six months or so learning, building, rebuilding, and
trying to get it to work. I started with Planet CCRMA, and it didn't
work. Looking back on it, I think I did some things wrong. Besides,
I really would like to be able to compile everything, so I can
analyze the code, and maybe contribute something. It all started
coming together this weekend when I finally got Ardour to compile,
install, and even run !!
I wasn't trying to build a DAW just yet. I just wanted to get it to
build and run on my laptop to experiment with it before I dive in.
In a month or so I hope to be building a completely Linux-based DAW
and this was just a sort of "proof of concept". My laptop is an IBM
Thinkpad T20, PIII 700 with 256MB RAM and 10GB HDD. I installed
RedHat9 and went from there. At some point I may install a USB or
PCMCIA soundcard to use it for spectral analysis and other things in
live use, but for now it's just a test box.
I followed Jan Depner's Installing from scratch howto at djcj.org
(thanks, Jan!!) and combined that with several other howto's googles,
and other info. I built the low-latency kernel (3 or 4 times before
I finally got it right) with the low-latency and pre-emption patches,
installed ALSA, LADSPA, JACK, and much of the other stuff from Jan's
tutorial. Then came Ardour.
I downloaded the tarball from the Ardour site. It configured and
compiled without problems. The interesting thing is that the first
time I started Ardour, my computer completely locked up. The mouse
wouldn't move, I couldn't switch apps using the keyboard. I figure
that if I had it connected to a network I could've SSH'd in and
killed some processes, but it wasn't connected, so I shut it down.
Upon rebooting I had to run fsck to recover my filesystem. Not an
extremely painful experience. After I got everything booted back up,
I said "what the heck, I'll try it again", and this time it did not
crash. I was able to import some wave files and play around with it.
I was not able to record using my laptop's mic, but I haven't really
tried to debug that yet, and it's not terribly important at this
point.
I wanted to do some more experimenting, so I downloaded and installed
wxWindows-GTK and Freqtweak, compiled, and installed them. For some
reason Freqtweak gives me an error when I try to run it. Something
about cannot load wxGTK-2.4.1.so, no such file or directory. I
suppose I need to learn something about installing shared libraries
and making them available to other applications. Any tips would be
appreciated.
Well, I said all that to say a huge THANK YOU!! to all who have
contributed these tools. I can't wait to really get started. It's
always been my dream to develop and use audio software and now it
looks like there's a platform for doing that. So, I plan to continue
down this path, and hopefully, be able to contribute something. It
looks like a lot of these tools could use some good documentation, so
maybe I'll look into that.
If you've read this far, thank you again.
Greg
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