[PlanetCCRMANews] fedora core 5 support: a start

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

Hi all and thanks for the patience :-)

Here's a start, a few Planet CCRMA packages for FC5. This of course does
not mean you should install FC5 right now, but if you can't wait and
want to try some things out (I know many of you have _already_ installed
FC5 :-) then this is a beginning... but only for good sports, as Bill
Schottstaedt would say...

[BTW, FC4 users, don't despair, all these shiny new versions of packages
should percolate to previous FC versions soon]

So...

Planet CCRMA on FC5 is yum based. 

First thing to do after installing fc5 is:

rpm -Uvh
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/5/i386/planetccrma-repo-1.0-2.rhfc5.ccrma.noarch.rpm

(wow, that's a long url...)

This will install a yum configuration file that points to the Planet
CCRMA repositories (two of them right now), plus a mirror of Fedora
Extras. At this point Planet CCRMA depends on Extras, so that has to be
there. There are also pointers to updates and the core os but those are
disabled by default. You can edit this file and enable them if you want:

  /etc/yum.repos.d/planetccrma.repo

Plus you can look at the existing packages here, courtesy of repoview:

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/5/i386/repodata/
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetcore/5/i386/repodata/

You probably should edit another yum preference. 

By default (out of the box) yum keeps just the last two kernels
installed. If experience is any guide you will want to keep more of
them. Edit this file and disable this plugin:
  /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/installonlyn.conf

After that you will manage kernels and decide which to keep and which to
erase. 

To install the latest and greatest kernel:
  yum install planetccrma-core-edge
or
  yum install planetccrma-core-edge-smp
(for a multiprocessor kernel)

This will get you (today) 2.6.16.9 plus Ingo Molnar's realtime
preemption patch 2.6.16-rt17 configured as PREEMPT_RT (the best option
but the most "bleeding edge"). This was all done on top of Fedora's
1.2080 kernel - a pain because I had to tweak Ingo's patch a bit, and
hopefully that was done correctly. It should have the good side effect
of being closer to the configuration that Fedora chooses, that is,
should be a little bit more compatible with FC than plain vanilla
2.6.16.x (as I used to do before). Remains to be seen how long I'll be
able to do this. One more difference (for gurus), I have built these
kernels with 4KSTACKS=n - there were a couple of stack overflows with
that on and the realtime preempt patch. 

A notch down in performance is:
  yum install planetccrma-core
or
  yum install planetccrma-core-smp

That will get you the same thing as the previous one but with Ingo's
patch configured as PREEMPT_DESKTOP. It may help when PREEMPT_RT does
not work on your hardware. 

Both selections will bring in some additional goodies as usual. Those
include 1.0.11 final ALSA kernel modules, ALSA firmware, tools and oss
packages, the rtirq script that optimizes IRQ priorities for best
realtime sound performance and a patched PAM that will give you complete
access to SCHED_FIFO for best performance, and the ability to hang the
machine as well :-)

Current kernels are named:
kernel-2.6.16-1.2080.13.rrt.rhfc5.ccrma.i686.rpm
for the PREEMPT_RT one, and
kernel-2.6.16-1.2080.13.rdt.rhfc5.ccrma.i686.rpm
for the PREEMPT_DESKTOP kernel
(and the smp and i586 variations as well)

There are some music packages, after all the kernel should be invisible
and does not make music (unless you try to old trick of cat'ting the
kernel image to a sound device... turn down the volume first! :-)

Currently:
  jack 0.101.0-0.2.cvs
  qjackctl 0.2.20-1
  liblrdf 0.4.0 (and raptor 1.4.9)
  lash 0.5.1
  fluidsynth 1.0.7a-1
  qsynth 0.2.5-1
  ardour 0.99.3-1

I build the CAPS LADSPA plugin collection but it has a problem with
selinux - for some reason Ardour is not allowed to load them, sigh, I
still have to do research on this so I'll wait a bit before releasing
them. I'll see if that also happens with other plugin collections...

If you like to excersice the mouse you can try installing yumex for
something similar to good 'ol synaptic. 

More packages will be forthcoming...
Enjoy!
-- Fernando