Hello all,
As has been mentioned, installing planet CCRMA is probably the easiest way to get out-of-the-box good latency. I've been using Ubuntu linux recently though, since I like how easy they're making it to install/update/configure (finally!). ubuntustudio.com is a resource that I've found for setting up Ubuntu linux for audio work. http://ubuntustudio.com/wiki/index.php/Welcome%2C_Musicians%21
On the front page they mention Mubuntu, an alleged multimedia derivitave of Ubuntu, that is still in the works. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mubuntu
I've been using Ubuntu for PD with pretty good latency results - by applying the realtime/preemptive patch I got my [adc~] -> [dac~] latency down to about 8msec. This was for the "Breezy" distro of Ubuntu, and the explanation of how to do it is here: http://ubuntustudio.com/wiki/index.php/Breezy:Vanilla_Kernel_With_Realtime_P...
Now that I've updated to the lateset Ubuntu (Dapper), the how-to no longer applies, but I think I'm still getting decent latency, running pd with the -rt flag. -David M.
Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Charles Henry hat gesagt: // Charles Henry wrote:
I've started learning a bit about alternative kernels for real-time linux, and I've got some masochistic notion to investigate Linux From Scratch. One of my friends says this is his favorite way to build a system...I have a lot to learn. I'm currently using Fedora Core 4 with the 2.4.19 kernel on a 1.6 GHz Sempron processor (could be upgraded to an Athlon64). I'm not sure which system specs are most important for getting good throughput, front side bus, memory access speed...how to balance them?
If you run a stock 2.4 kernel you will get really bad latency behaviour. You can fix this by using some realtime-patched 2.4 kernel but I would recommend to go a different route: Just install a recent 2.6 kernel, enable preemptible kernel etc. in the config and live happily with it.
Stock 2.6 kernels now have excellent latency behaviour in the range of 1-3 msec. The so called "hard realtime" latency that can be achieved with Ingo Molnar's rt-patches will give latencies even below that, but do you really need them? In my opninion most Pd users don't need them and the time spend figuring out a good combination of rt-patch version and kernel version is better spent optimizing your Pd patches.
Use Linux from Scratch if you are bored and have too much time on your hands. It will not give you relevantly better performance and IMO is not worth the effort. If you like to watch the output of make and gcc, Gentoo will satisfy you as well, but if you rather spend your time using, than compiling software, something like Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian (my fav.) is a better choice.
Ciao