Re: [LAU] Jack, Ardour, and the Gentoo Pro-Audio Overlay

On Fri, 17 Jul 2009, Tim Jones wrote:

> I've been settling into my own Gentoo system, and so far haven't had
> any trouble with unmasked pro-audio packages (for numbered versions
> anyway) interfering with anything else in portage. It seems to me that
> pro-audio is not very well maintained. I've had to hack several
> ebuilds to get them to work, but for the ones that do, likely any
> masks are just because no one has tested the ebuild, or because it is
> live.

Since the time I wrote earlier, I've had significant progress getting
things installed, mostly from avoiding the live CVS versions of
everything, and settling for Jack 0.116.2, which is still 0.116 or newer
as cautioned on the Ardour site. (I compiled with no DBus or firewire
support, since I don't use Ffado or FreeBob.) Everything now seems to
coexist well with my other apps and system libraries. I've got Ardour
2.7.1.

My next challenge is to pick a version of rt-sources and get that
configured and setup. I usually prefer to setup a kernel with modules
that my current system has or is likely to ever have, and put the ones
that are needed to boot into the kernel statically, so I'm going to see
if I can do without an initrd. That certainly out to be possible
though. I just don't like having ninety drivers I don't use autoloaded
by 'discover' during the bootup...it's annoying.

I wonder if it's better to go with the unmasked rt-sources-2.6.16-r29
(which I see has a very high patchlevel number, so apparently a lot of
time is going into it), or the newest rt-sources-2.6.29.2-r11, which is
more current, but masked. I asked this recently on the Pro-Audio
overlay list, so I'll see what they say there.

> But more people care about jack and Ardour so you're likely to find
> more support on those. Anyway, I would say don't be afraid of the
> masked packages.

Yeah, I've seen so many packages in Pro-Audio that needed unmasking to
install that I've just started treating that as par for the course in
the overlay. I'm still sticking with stable packages for my base system
though.

> I generally haven't built any dbus support, and I'm not sure how jack
> itself uses dbus. Not sure about "classic" either, but for those
> undocumented flags, I find the best thing to do is just open the
> ebuild and see what options those flags are passing to configure
> (which you should be able to figure out without any knowledge of how
> ebuilds work) and then see what those do.

I did finally find a websvn interface to the changelogs on the overlay
site that described that: It's for if you'd like to compile both Dbus
*and* non-Dbus Jack -- you can enable "dbus" and "classic" together.
I've just gone with 0.116.2 and no Dbus, and that seems to coexist with
everything else nicely.

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
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