[PlanetCCRMA] XFCE works best for me!

Spec specialaka@blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Oct 11 13:19:01 2005


I was messing around trying to get low latency working, removed nearly 
every service, and switched to using xfce and that reduced memory 
requirements plus it seems even hdparm -tT hard disk tests run faster in 
xfce than in gnome. 

Now I get 1.33 ms latency at 48khz quite solidly as long as I am not 
using the hd (which is slow on my machine even though I used tuning 
params, I think LVM has something to do with it, disk druid set up 
2*60gb drives as one LVM volume) cat /proc/ide/via shows hard disks as 
88.8mb/s (thats ide capability I suspect as barracuda drives are specced 
40mb/s) but hdparm -tT tests show average about 38mb/s in xfce and only 
30mb/s in gnome.

it seems under ccrma many apps require the gnome/kde libs installed, is 
it possible to compile progs that dont need the gnome daemons like 
bonobo, gconfd etc. that will work under xfce i.e. is GTK tied to Gnome 
daemons etc. or are there compile options?

As an interesting note I thought I had fixed the problem my modifying 
the HAL config according to this article, which is useful as far as 
external drives and laptops are concerned
 > http://www.shallowsky.com/blog/index.cgi/linux/hald-poll.html
 > "The solution is to edit /etc/hal/hald.conf, and change true to false 
under
 > <storage_media_check_enabled> and ><storage_automount_enabled_hint>. 
This changes hald from a
 > "blacklist" policy, where everything is polled unless >you blacklist 
it, to a "whitelist" policy, where
 > nothing is polled unless you whitelist it. Voila! No more polling the 
disk,  and no more beepy-clicky
 >  noises. I suspect my drive will last longer and eat less battery 
power, too."

Also It seems the memory management method and paging can also cause 
problems (only 512mb ram on my pc), I reckon for speed you need no LVM 
and separate devices for swap file and program files/general data and 
another one for audio data.  I now know what I need to do for FC4 
anyway....  A faster graphics card might help as well...