[64studio-devel] [a-users] some 64Studio questions and comments

[Daniel James]

Hi Dave,

> I'm 
> not sure which is the preferred forum for reporting user-level 
> experiences with 64Studio.

I do understand the confusion. We don't have a 64studio-users list yet, 
but probably should have one for the 1.0 release. Ideally, we'd have 
seamless integration between a Mailman list and a web forum, but I don't 
know of a site that's achieved that.

> I discovered that the on-board nVidia chipset includes 
> only 64 MB video RAM

Check your BIOS - if it's shared memory, you may be able to allocate more.

> Meanwhile the 
> vesa mode works well, except that dragging a window in GNOME is 
> surprisingly s-l-o-w.

It shouldn't be like that, even with 64MB video RAM. A 32MB Matrox card 
like a G550 handles 2D very well, and I run the vesa driver on my HP 
laptop (ATI 200M chipset) with acceptable 2D results. It could be some 
video acceleration problem on your particular hardware, perhaps. If you 
are able to improve performance, please let us know.

> Next question: What about tuning drives with hdparm on a 64-bit system ? 
> Does 64Studio automatically optimize drive performance

DMA and 32-bit I/O should be on by default. Of course you can tweak 
other hdparm settings (as root).

> How do I ensure that the snd-virmidi module gets loaded at boot ?

Put a line for it in /etc/modutils/alsa-base perhaps? We haven't tested 
that though.

> I'm having trouble building 64-bit Csound5, the build fails at a problem 
> with FLTK :
> 
> g++ -o frontends/fltk_gui/CsoundGlobalSettings.o -c -fexceptions -Wall 
> -g -gstabs -O2 -fPIC -DLINUX -DPIPES -DHAVE_LIBSNDFILE=1016 -DHAVE_FLTK 
> -DBETA -DHAVE_FCNTL_H -DHAVE_UNISTD_H -DHAVE_STDINT_H -DHAVE_SYS_TIME_H 
> -DHAVE_SYS_TYPES_H -DHAVE_TERMIOS_H -DHAVE_SOCKETS -DHAVE_DIRENT_H -I. 
> -IH -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include -I/usr/X11R6/include 
> -Iinterfaces -I/usr/include/freetype2 
> frontends/fltk_gui/CsoundGlobalSettings.cpp
> frontends/fltk_gui/CsoundGlobalSettings.cpp: In constructor 
> 'CsoundGlobalSettings::CsoundGlobalSettings()':
> frontends/fltk_gui/CsoundGlobalSettings.cpp:47: internal compiler error: 
> output_operand: invalid expression as operand

We haven't run into this one, but then none of our testers have 
mentioned running Csound. I'd take it to the Csound list - please let us 
know what they say.

Cheers!

Daniel