Hallo, Stefan Turner hat gesagt: // Stefan Turner wrote:
An alternative to consider might be a small barebone system, where you can use a good and inexpensive PCI card like the M-Audio Delta 1010LT directly. You know, something like the MSI Hetis 915:
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/slim_pc/slm_index.php
Thanks Frank that's an excellent idea, especially as I was hoping to (later) upgrade my laptop. Just one question: how easy is it to set up Linux (specifically Fedora if possible) to automatically login, and load up Jack and PD, for when I leave the screen and keyboard at home during gigs? And how do you tell it to shutdown???
That's all very easy to set up any way you like. If you have the laptop with you, you could login to your machine using a ssh connection and start any scripts you want. You could also let the display of the barebone run on your laptop using X-Forwarding or VNC.
Or do everything totally automated with some custom startup scripts for example located in /etc/init.d simular to the other stuff that's already started from there.
Shutting down can also be done either from a ssh-connection ("shutdown -h now") or use the power button, which on modern systems can also send a special ACPI event, which gets catched by Linux' acpi-daemon, which then initiates a proper "shutdown -h" itself.
All this is pretty standard stuff and easy to do: I guess, the majority of Linux machines running worldwide do so as servers, often without screen and keyboard.
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__