[PlanetCCRMA] CCRMA on a laptop

[jason.ronallo@gmail.com]

I've got a FC3 ccrma kernel running on a Inspiron 5100 with 2.66Ghz P4
with only 318MB ram. I'm using the Linuxant driverloader for the
truemobile (broadcom) wireless card, but will get back to trying
ndiswrapper sometime in the future.  I'm getting occassional xruns
(usually when starting up another program or when rosegarden crashes)
but haven't had a chance to increase ram or fool with jack settings
much. Using a lighter weight window manager (xfce for me) helped a lot
to reduce xruns.  I've noticed that when playing FLACs from the
harddrive with alsaplayer through jack that I get some dropped sound,
but no xruns are produced.  And I haven't even thought about possible
IRQ problems as mentioned on the planet tuning page.  Big problem I
had was getting a softsynth to work since I don't have any midi
devices and snd-seq wasn't loading until I forced it to. In other
respects it is serving me well as a all-round desktop replacement
laptop, but if I knew I was going to want to do multimedia stuff under
linux I'd have chosen my laptop more carefully.  I'm just playing
around with sound so for my purposes right now it's sufficient.

--Jason