[PlanetCCRMA] On the Necessity of Being Root

[Jan Depner]

On Sat, 2006-02-04 at 00:53 -0500, Benjamin Hardy wrote:
> I was always running my apps as a normal user, not root. Is it still 
> better to run Jack, Ardour, et el as root for better real time 
> performance? 

    It's no longer necessary to run as root.  You used to have to run as
root so you could run SCHED_FIFO to get good performance.  If you
weren't running as root with a 2.4 kernel you weren't running real-time.

> I always had issues with latency but I either blamed it on 
> my Audigy card or for using KDE (though I also had problems in XFCE). At 
> the moment I'm back to using Windows XP to make use of my Maudio 
> Audiophile 192 (and am pretty disappointed about the situation). I still 
> check back in the Linux world to see what's happening.

    The easiest way to get everything set up nicely is to load FC3 and
then use the Planet CCRMA stuff.

> 
> 
> Jan Depner wrote:
> > On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 13:19 -0800, Brian Good wrote:
> >   
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I've been lurking for a year now, but I've been too busy to do more than 
> >> dabble.  I understand the
> >> argument for doing your audio work as root, but if the net is your textbook 
> >> the inhibition about net
> >> surfing as root impedes study and switching  back and forth between virtual 
> >> terminals is just too
> >> cumbersome so I wish this stuff could be made to run by mere mortal users.
> >>
> >>     
> >
> >     You don't have to run as root anymore but don't ask me how to set it
> > up ;-)  I run my window manager as a normal user but I run
> > JACK/qjackctl, Ardour, and JAMin as root.  I just have icons on my KDE
> > desktop that run as root (it's easy to set up).  When I click one it
> > asks me for the root password.  I trust the people who are maintaining
> > JACK/qjackctl, Ardour, and JAMin (I would certainly hope so ;-) so I
> > don't worry about those applications causing problems on my system.
> > When I'm doing serious recording (8 channels for me) I'll log in using
> > fluxbox as root - my startup script for qjackctl shuts down ALL
> > extraneous processes, including the network so that my system is
> > isolated.
> >
> >
> >   
> >> Thank you, Fernando, for all your fine work.  And thanks to the other board 
> >> gurus for their generous advice, which has benefited me second hand many 
> >> times.
> >>     
> >
> >
> >     Second that!
> >
> >
> >   
> 
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-- 
Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner
The Fuzzy Dice
http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html


"As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be 
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