[PlanetCCRMANews] Planet CCRMA starts deorbit procedures for landing on Fedora 11

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

So, the first phase in what is hoped to be a soft landing on the new
world of Fedora 11 has started. 

A new rt kernel for Fedora 11 has been released. Based on the freshly
minted rt17 for 2.6.29.4 patch, and the latest koji Fedora kernel
package. So, the configuration will closely match Fedora's. Some notes
regarding the kernel:

- all the new noveau NVidia + drm stuff is missing as it does not patch
cleanly on the vanilla + rt sources (it is probably fixable but I don't
have time for that now). 

- Fedora 11 does not seem to load snd-seq automatically so qjackctl and
anything that uses ALSA midi will fail or will pop up warning messages,
see bug 505421 in bugzilla:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=505421

You can, as root, do a "/sbin/modprobe snd-seq" and all will be well
(till the next reboot). 

- I added a patch to properly wait for the RME io boxes (known issue in
2.6.29.x). 

For those that already tried the rt kernel I released yesterday:

This new kernel is now properly (I hope) packaged for Fedora 11. If you
run in an i686 machine the PAE kernel is now the only option. There is
an i586 kernel for those with older machines. Options for the x86_64
kernel are the same as before. If you tried the first trial balloon
release of yesterday you may have to erase planetccrma-core-* and the
kernel-rt or kernel-rtPAE packages so that the correct architecture is
picked when installing the new packages... or maybe not :-) The new
kernels are (sort of) tested, at least they boot fine in a test hardware
setup I have here on a just installed and updated Fedora 11. 

Packages:

I finally unleashed my automatic rebuild script and there are now, as a
first preliminary result, 65 new packages to load and/or use. See the
repoview links for details as to what is available. Many packages failed
to build thanks to changes in include file requirements due to the gcc
upgrade so a LOT of very boring work awaits me. You will not find pd,
supercollider or chuck yet... 

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetccrma/11/i386/repoview/
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetcore/11/i386/repoview/
(and equivalent x86_64 links)

Most packages are sort of tested, most start fine, a couple of caveats:

- ams: needs the ladspa-cmt-plugins package (for some of the demos)
which is not installed automagically as before, don't know why.

- cheesetracker: apparently needs /dev/dsp which is not an installed
option in Fedora 11. Maybe it is OSS only and then will head quickly to
extinction. I have not investigated. 

So all in all this is a start. But you should probably wait quite a bit
before starting to think about migrating...

Of course a lot of other stuff is already in Fedora, so YMMV...
Enjoy!!
-- Fernando