I've got a VIA C3 board (not sure about the model number) which was my main machine for a while. They're wonderful, not too fast, but very low power and reliable. Main thing I advise is to stay away from Gnome and KDE which are real CPU soakers. I use Fvwm which is wonderful, and twm is also great but takes a bit more work to learn to use. As long as your window manager and related garbage isn't eating 90% of your CPU you can rock and roll all day on a VIA CPU, and be a low polluter as well.

cheers Miller

On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 07:56:27PM -0700, kevin ernste wrote:

--- Julien Jassaud sojastar@wanadoo.fr wrote:

...

Hi to all,

I've been using pd on OS X but I now need to use it with Linux on a Via Epia 5000 board. So I have two questions:

• has anyone ever used pd with such a motherboard?
• what is the best Linux distribution to use pd with?

I can't help you on the motherboard, but I would highly recommend Redhat Linux with PlanetCCRMA packages (low-latency/preemptive kernel, etc), including PD and libs:

http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/planetccrma.html

A close second, IMHO, would be Mandrake, and I'm sure others would mention Debian, esecially Agnula (http://www.agnula.org/).

Kevin

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PD-dev mailing list PD-dev@iem.at http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-dev

hi all,

please, dont confuse window-managers with desktop-enviroments.

kde is (and gnome as well) a complete enviroment, with apps, helpers, tools...

you can happily use any other window manager in kde, like icewm, fvwm, .....

also, you can disable all that funky bells and whistles in kde, thus making it pretty plain while still giving the great flexibility of a desktop.

memory shouldnt be a real concern nowdays, ask your local dealer for the price of, lets say, 256 mbyte.

for the "cpu-hog": it hogs as much cpu as many bells-and-whistles you have enabled. and, as with any app using dynamic librarys, if you load a single kde app in a non-kde enviroment, it takes pretty "long" the first time. but if you were inside kde, where most of the libs are already loaded, it will go really fast.

i for myself will never give up the ease-of-use of a real desktop like (and especially) kde.

greets,

chris

Chris,

Agreed, but you must admit that running just a window-manager is lighter than running a full desktop-environment, no matter how much you strip them back. Obviously the more processes running on your system, the more CPU time that must be shared. Also, I find the startup times of a freshly installed Gnome or KDE desktop simply intolerable, but that is a matter of personal preference I suppose.

Chris.

On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 09:49:02AM +0200, Christian Klippel wrote:

hi all,

please, dont confuse window-managers with desktop-enviroments.

kde is (and gnome as well) a complete enviroment, with apps, helpers, tools...

you can happily use any other window manager in kde, like icewm, fvwm, .....

also, you can disable all that funky bells and whistles in kde, thus making it pretty plain while still giving the great flexibility of a desktop.

memory shouldnt be a real concern nowdays, ask your local dealer for the price of, lets say, 256 mbyte.

for the "cpu-hog": it hogs as much cpu as many bells-and-whistles you have enabled. and, as with any app using dynamic librarys, if you load a single kde app in a non-kde enviroment, it takes pretty "long" the first time. but if you were inside kde, where most of the libs are already loaded, it will go really fast.

i for myself will never give up the ease-of-use of a real desktop like (and especially) kde.

greets,

chris

---

PD-dev mailing list PD-dev@iem.at http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-dev

TimBlechmann@gmx.net wrote:

...

• what is the best Linux distribution to use pd with?

i'm using pd with suse which works fine, but i'm interested in switching to gentoo. it should get the best performance out of your system by compiling all programs optimized for your machine!

which seems to be more a rumour than proven fact. see

http://articles.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&fi...

for a comparison of debian, gentoo and mandrake.

debian or redhat/planet ccrma has more audio packages than gentoo has. recompiling of rpm or deb packages is not very difficult, if you want to optimize the binary for you CPU.

On Tue, 02 Sep 2003 15:51:11 +0200 smoerk smoerk@gmx.de wrote:

TimBlechmann@gmx.net wrote:

...

...

• what is the best Linux distribution to use pd with?

i'm using pd with suse which works fine, but i'm interested in switching to gentoo. it should get the best performance out of your system by compiling all programs optimized for your machine!

which seems to be more a rumour than proven fact. see

http://articles.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&fi...

they used a celeron machine without any further optimizations beside "-march=pentium3 -pipe -O3" to compare the systems. they didn't use any sse/sse2/mmx optimizations...

i suppose (i can't prove it) you should get a bit more performance on these machine that they did for the test... they used the most stable settings...

Tim mailto:TimBlechmann@gmx.de ICQ: 96771783 http://www.nyds-exp-discogs.tk -- The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" Jack Kerouac