Wishlist

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi all :)

I'm new to the Ubuntu Studio devel list and I'm not sure if it's the right place for me, so please blame Mike, if I should annoy you ;p.

I was upset when I read that you'll switch the DE, until the community give a fair warning, that GNOME2 won't be supported any more.

Hurray, I already needed to switch from KDE3 to GNOME2 when there was the switch to KDE4 and now I've got to switch again, I believe unsighted that GNOME3 isn't a good choice and I do agree that there are two DEs that in case of emergency could replace GNOME2. XFCE and LXDE. Fluxbox and e17 can't do, dunno which DEs you were thinking of and I don't know the current XFCE, but I guess you did a step in the right direction with XFCE.

Anyway, Mike is right that now is a good time for some "wishes".

First of all, since 2003/2004, when I switched from the Atari ST TOS to Suse Linux 9.0, the wheel of my mouse is working, until I switched from Ubuntu Karmic (resp. 64 Studio) to Ubuntu Studio Lucid. For my current Edubuntu Maverick, the mouse wheel seldom is working. I'm not only thinking of my mouse-wheel issue, but about the mouse movements in general. Over the weekend I'm sorting out old Linux installs and data on my HDDs, while doing this I run 64 Studio 3.3 with LXDE. Using the mouse there is like slow motion. For home recording and I suspect less professional audio studios are using Ubuntu Studio, often one person needs to do everything her/him self, the instrument in one hand, the mouse in the other hand, hence using the mouse should be "fast", resp. small movements should enable to cross the whole screen, while it also should be possible to select -1, -2 and -3 dB for a fader and not only  -1 and -3 dB ;), this is able by using GNOME2.

Did you notice something?

I'm talking about music only. IMO the usage of video, paint and animation apps doesn't really need a special distro, ok, for e.g.  Cinelerra there might be the need to have a special repository, regarding to codec issues and the GNU etc., but special tweaks are needed for real-time audio.

For GNOME2 sessions on my Maverick install, the default CPU frequency scaling setting of my customized configured kernel 2.6.33.9-rt31 is ignored. It's set down to "ondemand".

Today I installed Ardour3, hence I'm knowingly just used the computer set to "ondemand". The installer warned me:

"!!! WARNING !!! - Your system seems to use frequency scaling.
This can have a serious impact on audio latency. You have two choices:
(1) turn it off, e.g. by chosing the 'performance' governor.
(2) Use the HPET clocksource by passing "-c h" to JACK
(this second option only works on relatively recent computers)"

And even on relatively recent computers there's a limit for the apps that can use HPET, I'm only enabling it for ALSA seq and not by/for Jack.

Perhaps you should connect a power meter to your computer and compare the load. The difference between "performance" and "ondemand" will be around 1W for modern multi-core machines, which isn't much. If you're using a laptop think about the load needed by the display ;).

Envy24 cards should work OOTB as they did, before PolypAudio grabbed everything and by the way, current version of Envy24 control is version 1 "mudita" since a long time ago. 
Note that just editing /usr/share/alsa/cards didn't work for Maverick any more here! I need to pseudo-disable PA, without really knowing what I'm doing ;).
I'll order a better card next week, but Envy24 cards are wide spread and, because we're talking about future releases of Ubuntu Studio, using Jack2 from svn with

	sudo chgrp audio /dev/hpet
        sudo chmod g+rw /dev/hpet
	sudo modprobe snd-hrtimer

and

jackd --sync -Xalsarawmidi -dalsa [snip]

+

a2jmidi_bridge

+

the current kernel-rt enabled using hw MIDI out without audible jitter. I already got best results with older versions of Jackd2, when running latency tests, but the jitter anyway was audible for me, I couldn't use external MIDI equipment.

The kernel can set a default for the frequency scaling gov and the DE, WM, frame based environment, install for text mode only, in other words, any kind of userinterface should use this as the default.

Set "ondemand" as default for the PREEMPT only kernels, I'll set "performance" for my kernel-rt and if there should be a kernel-rt by the repositories too, it also should be set to "performance".

I add

$ cat /etc/rcS.d/S69switch_xorg.conf
#! /bin/sh
# /etc/rcS.d/Switch_xorg_conf

rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
case $(uname -r) in
    *rt*)
        cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.nv /etc/X11/xorg.conf
        ;;
    *)
	cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.nvidia /etc/X11/xorg.conf
        ;;
esac

to my current install, to solve that annoying proprietary driver issue, regarding to the RT patched kernels.

You might add a similar script, while just "*rt*)" and "*)" is a vague sort, that might not work on all machines. I know that the main issue with this idea is, that usually there isn't a xorg.conf any more.

Qtractor needs more often upgrades for it's package (but not without consulting testers, before changing a version) and perhaps other sequencers, I'm not using need might need more often upgrades of the packages too and of cause, Ardour3 should be included ASAP.

Basic apps, such as e.g. Fluidsynth IMO don't need upgrades that often, but because they are basic apps they have to be stable. The default Fluidsynth-DSSI is (or was?) hardcore broken for Maverick, just producing noise.

What's about LinuxDSP FX?

VSTs? And yes, something similar to a chroot or in general 32-bit libs for a 64-bit install? Think about Animata, LightScribe, VSTs etc..

I can try to help a little bit, but I'm not a coder and I don't want to spend too much time with testing etc. any more.

Perhaps more, but just 2 Cents.

Cheers!

Ralf