[PlanetCCRMA] Update: Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT and RT kernel

[JOHN LYON]

It's early days, but I can report that my gnome desktop appears to be working under the most recent rt kernel for Fedora 8 (2.6.24.7-1.rt3.2.fc8.ccrmart).  Thanks to those who posted in response to my cry for help.  

What did I do?  I went out and purchased a new nVidia video card, the GeForce 9500 GT.  I am using the most recent stable nVidia driver, (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-177.82-pkg1.run), but I did patch the 'nv-linux.h' header file with the 'compat_semaphore' structs as described in the PlanetCCRMA mailing lists from earlier this year.  I WAS using an nVidia 7300 GT video card.  I have no idea why the nvidea 9500 GT card seems to work while the older one doesn't work with the rt kernels. 
I am just so happy (so far!) that I cna now get down to business and make and record some music.   

I may do the kmod-nvidia thing, with akmod as well, but so far I just want to test it, make sure it works, and play some music.

For what it's worth, my big focus before the video card was acoustic room treatment.  My home project studio is a rectangular room approximately 10' x 17' by 8' high, and I can't rebuild it to get rid of the parallel wall.  So I built eight 2' x 4' bass traps using a frame of 1"x4" boards, lined them with 4" Roxul Safe and Sound rock wool insulation, which I had left over from another home renovation project. I covered them with burlap on the back and speaker cloth on the front and sides.  I placed them in the high-reflectin areas on the wall and in the corners where the bass really builds up.  I can hear a huge improvement in the room sound, especially in the bass. I've been watching the videos on acoustic room treatments posted by Ethan Winer at http://www.realtraps.com; I think they're great. I've also built a couple of Skyline diffusors out of 2x2s and I like the sound of my studio even more.  

I've been running room testing software (the free Room Equalization Wizard from home theater shack) to see what my acoustic treatments look like in a waterfall chart.  The really large peaks and valleys in the bass frequencies have been replaced by a large number of much smaller peaks and valleys, which is exactly the result I was hoping for.  

I'm so impressed with the bass traps and the diffusors that I've ordered some Owens-Corning 703 rigid fiberglass in 2' x 4' x 3" size and I'm going to make some more traps; and yes, I'm going to buy some 2x2s and make a couple more Skyline diffusors too.  I might evern make some tube traps for the corners---but first, some music!

Thanks again for the help, and I hope this experience helps some other members on this list.

John