[64studio-devel] First impressions, feedback and assistance request.

[Daniel James]

Hi Simon,

> My first impression of 64studio is excellent - its the first distro 
> where I can start jackd in realtime mode as a user and not from root, 
> congratulations..!

Thanks! ;-)

> I have to admit, I had to change a couple of configuration files to do 
> this - you may want to include the changes in the next iso update. The 
> changes are:
> 
> Add the following 3 lines to /etc/security/limits.conf
> 
> @audio - rtprio 100
> @audio - memlock 4000000
> @audio - nice -10
> 
> The above will not have any affect unless the prioritised programs are 
> listed in /etc/set_rlimits.conf . For example I added the line
> 
> @audio  /usr/bin/jackd  nice=-10  rtprio=100 memlock=4000000
> 
> to give jackd priority.

I'm surprised you needed to do that, as we didn't use PAM or rlimits in 
the 1.0 release, falling back on the tried-and-tested realtime-lsm 
approach. Perhaps you set up your system a little differently to how we 
expected.

> Further, most keyboards & midi-controllers are connected to usb and tend 
> to grab alsa. To make sure the audio-card is set to card 0 I added the 
> following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
> 
> options snd-usb-audio index=-2

That's a good tip; setting device priority is a common chore for users 
with multiple devices. Maybe there should be a desktop applet for it.

> On a different point, it would be nice if your repo was included in 
> /etc/apt/sources.list as standard
> 
> deb http://apt.64studio.com/64studio/stable 64studio main

It is there, just not in that file :-) Have a look here:

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/64studio.list

Doing it this way allows us to manipulate several alternative package 
lists, instead of writing all the entries to a single file.

> I wanted install the correct video driver for my video card - 
> "NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9631-pkg1.run" This installs OK under openSUSE 
> 10.2 and Ubuntu 6.10 but with 64studio the installation was broken 
> because the linux kernel was compiled with a different complier than 
> that supplied on the CD.

People wishing to run the binary nVidia drivers will find it much easier 
to use the 1.1.1 development release, which you can find here:

http://apt.64studio.com/64studio/

It includes the nvidia modules, so you can install the drivers the 
Debian way:

http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Installation

> I wanted to install the latest version of qsynth but the QTDIR is not 
> set.

Here's the bash command to do that:

# export QTDIR=/usr/share/qt3

(or /usr/share/qt4 if you want qt4)

Then type:

# env

It will list all the environment variables you have set. You'll also 
need to make sure you have the right development packages installed, as 
there are different ones for qt3 and qt4 of course:

http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=libqt&searchon=names&subword=1&version=testing&release=all

Cheers!

Daniel