[PlanetCCRMA] some weirdnesses on fc6 with reent upgrades

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 17:25 -0500, M P Smoak wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 March 2007 03:36 pm, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 20:57 +0100, joakim at verona.se wrote:
> > > I've been using ccrma on my i386 fc6 laptop for some time, and it
> > > has worked mostly well.
> > >
> > > Recently, however, all sorts of weirdness has crept in, I think
> > > only caused by yum upgrades.
> > >
> > > - qjackctl doesnt start. it just hangs before starting the gui.
> > > strace indicates its hanging on reading something.
> >
> > It does not help to not know what it was trying to read :-)
> >
> > You could try resetting the stored defaults for qjackctl, you should
> > find them in "~/.qt/qjackctlrc". Just erase the file (or move it to a
> > different location) and it will be recreated next time you start
> > qjackctl.

Did this work?

> > > - Bristol just crashes(but I only recently installed it, so I dont
> > >   know if it ever worked)
> > >
> > > - my wlan doesnt work anymore
> >
> > What kernel are you booting? (type "uname -r" in a terminal to find
> > out). It could be that the standard Fedora kernel has extra drivers
> > that cover your wireless card and they are not part of the rt kernel
> > (which is based on the vanilla Linus kernel plus Ingo's patches).
> >
> > Try booting into the Fedora kernel and see if wireless starts working
> > again.
> >
>
> Well, I think I just discovered that wireless will on Fedora kernel from
> ccrma for fc5.  I just got it working a few days ago but not for the rt
> kernel.  
> 
> In light of this, of the audio/sound packages in Planet-ccrma, what does 
> and what doesn't work using the plain fc5 kernel;  what do you loose by 
> not running the rt kernel?

All apps should work. Basically you will have higher latency. Not that
the Fedora kernel is very bad but if you need low latency (ie: you are
for example going to be triggering instruments in real time using jackd
with 128 frames or less) then you could/will get xruns. 

> (I'm trying to setup 2 machines right now, one a thinkpad laptop.  
> Three very good experienced linux support guys have failed to get sound 
> working on the desktop machine; left with very bruised egos.  

What soundcard?

> For the 
> thinkpad, I got Emperor Linux to install fc5; so far that is going well. 
> But I'm getting used to the feel of a laptop and setting up non audio 
> stuff using kde. )
> 
> I love linux and the ideas behind it, but installation and maintenance 
> is ...  well, not a pleasant passtime.  But, I hope, worth it.

Yeah, sometimes it is frustrating, sorry for that...

I'll check what drivers the Fedora kernel adds for wireless (could you
send the output of, say, /sbin/lspci?). Arghh. This is a road I prefer
not to have to travel[*], if my kernel starts diverging from Ingo's
released versions my workload will ramp up when there are new versions
available (so far he has not been releasing packages for 2.6.21-rcx). 

-- Fernando

[*] Ingo's rt patches are created to patch on top of the plain vanilla
kernel. Fedora adds patches on top of that - and bases the kernel on an
older more stable release (last time I checked). Both set of patches can
and sometimes do conflict. I used to adapt (to the best of my knowledge)
the rt patch to patch on top of the Fedora kernel but it was and
probably still is a painful process. And at some point I reach the limit
of my knowledge and can't do it because the changes are big enough that
they don't make sense to me. We'll see...