(this additional installation and configuration work has been
substantially reduced in Fedora Core 2 and 3 releases as
they use ALSA by default instead of OSS). While this is
not that hard, specially with the help of meta packages
and apt-get or synaptic, it appears that sometimes it is too
much work:-) And I have to agree, it would be much nicer
to have a single cd (hmm, actually a dvd given the size of
current distributions) and at the end of the install have everything ready to go, low latency kernel active, just start
the applications and make some music. I had long avoided
going down this road and becoming a "distribution" because of the additional work that would involve. It is hard
enough trying to keep up to date with the very fast evolution of Linux audio software.
But on and off I've been thinking about this idea, and
since November 2004 I've been actually doing something
about it. At the time of this writing (mid June 2005) I
already have a single "Planet CCRMA 3" dvd with everything in it, all of Fedora Core 3 including current updates
plus all of Planet CCRMA. This dvd is not small, about
2.7G of stuff, but remember, all of Fedora Core is included! I have also created a split distribution on 4 cdroms
for those that do not have access to dvdrom drives.
Installing Planet CCRMA from these images entails
booting into the dvd or cdrom, selecting the Planet CCRMA
desktop or workstation (which includes all development
tools) installation target, customizing the packages installed
if desired and pressing "Install" (while going through the
normal installation choices of a stock Fedora Core system
install, of course). One reboot and a few more configuration screens and you are up and running. Furthermore, the
dvd and cdrom creation process is pretty much automatic
at this point (start a series of scripts, wait for some time
and out comes a dvd iso image and the split cdroms).
Of course things are not that easy. What kernel should
I select for installation? The more stable or the more risky
that has better latency performance? How will the idiosyncracies of this non-standard kernel interact with the
Fedora Core install process? (for example, it may happen that it will fail to boot in some machines, while the
original Fedora Core kernel would have succeeded - and I
don't think Anaconda, the RedHat installer, would be able
to deal with more than one kernel at install time). For the
current dvd and cdrom images I'm using the more bleeding edge low latency "rdt" kernel series and so far it seems
to be working fine.
9. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Planet CCRMA project would never have been possible without the support for GNU/Linux and Open Source
at CCRMA, Stanford University, and in particular, the
support of to Chris Chafe, CCRMA's Director. It goes
without saying that I extend my heartfelt thanks to the
hundreds of commited developers whose software projects
I package. Without them Planet CCRMA would not exist
and I would live in much more boring world.
10. REFERENCES
[1] The Fedora Project. http://fedora.redhat.com/
[2] The Planet CCRMA Project.
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
[3] Ingo Molnar: Low latency patches for 2.2/2.4.
http://people.redhat.com/mingo/lowlatencypatches/
[4] MontaVista: The Preemptible Kernel
Patch. http://www.mvista.com/, see also
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/
NS7572420206.html
[5] Robert Love: The Preemptible Kernel Patch.
http://rlove.org/linux/
[6] Andrew Morton: Low latency patches for 2.4.
http://www.zip.com.au/ akpm/linux/schedlat.html
[7] Takashi Iwai: low latency tweaks.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/2702
[8] Ingo Molnar: Realtime Preemption patches for
2.6. http://people.redhat.com/mingo/realtimepreempt/
[9] Andrew Morton: the "mm" patches for 2.6.
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/
akpm/patches/2.6/
[10] Jack O'Quinn: the realtime Ism kernel module. http://sourceforge.net/projects/realtimeIsm/
[11] Linux Weekly News: Merging the realtime security module. http://lwn.net/Articles/118785/
[12] Weekly News: Low latency for Audio Applications. http://lwn.net/Articles/120797/
8. CONCLUSION
[13] Freshrpms:
http://freshrpms.net/
package repository.
It is easy to conclude that Planet CCRMA is very cool, and
very significant for research and production environments
where software freedom is important. Planet CCRMA as
a project is alive and well. As a maintainer I'm (barely)
alive, but have made it to another conference, no small
feat.
[14] Dag: package repository.
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
[15] The Jack Audio Connection Kit, a low latency
sound server. http://jackit.sf.net/
