I’m using this on my Thinkpad X30…
http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html
It’s tiny and efficient. Perfect 
Whoo! I decided to check out OpenSuse 11.2, and to my utter joy I could simply update my old installation… I hope they keep this up, having to reinstall was the last annoyance for me. A thousand times YAY!
And btw, though I’m not really doing any audio on Linux (yet), http://en.opensuse.org/RT_Kernel_Instructions = easy as pie… (add an url to the repositories, search for “rt-kernel” in the software manager – done, and it even gets automatically added to the boot menu)
I have ubuntu 9.10, everything works like it should, once again! Previous versions had some glitches with audio drivers. Not only with Renoise, but with everything.
Got this today from the Linux-Audio-Announce mailing list:
Renoise demo included by default.
Hi Supersole & all linux users.
I tested very different Linux distros. I recommend Ubuntu (the last LTS edition)and tweak it (pulse audio trough Jack, install ppa´s and repositories from specialized distros like AV Linux). The “audio distros” have the best RT kernels, but I dont want all the other stuff, so I install the repository and then I install only a few packages.
hi supersole, I personally use ubuntu 10.04 LTS with falktx repository enabled (check https://launchpad.net/~falk-t-j/+archive/lucid ) – it has ALL the native vsts/dssis that you want (also lv2 which they don’t work in renoise yet – hope that they will be supported at some point in the future)
if you like kde try kxstudio http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/ (which is the falktx’s distro) based on ubuntu 10.04 lts
ciao!
I had no problems running under Mint 8, but when I moved to Mint 10 I found I was getting worse performance in terms of latency and xruns. Maybe I need to try a different distro, either that or its time to update my hardware…
KXStudio looks interesting, and the latest AVLinux will probably be worth a try too.
Ahhh… must try that. I usually run XFCE…
Quick update… I’ve been testing out AVLinux (Live DVD only at the moment) and my previous problems seemed to have gone away. I do like AVLinux from what I’ve seen of it so far. Anyone else using this?
AVLinux is nice however at the moment I can’t have distro full of preinstalled apps by default. I just don’t like the fact I’m not fully aware of what is installed in my system. Having this said, I recommend ArchLinux (which has absolutly awesome package manager and build-system) or built very own Linux distro (linuxfromscratch.org) this is for enthusiasts though
In the end I settled on Crunchbang. Fast, lightweight and was reasonably straightforward setting up an RT kernel. Me happy bunny 
Keeping my eye on Arch though, intriguing setup they’ve got with that.
in my opinion if you like totake the time gentoo + pro audio overlay gives you the best result. You also have to be an uber geek or don’t mind to take some days to install and set-up your OS… As mentioned Arch is also really slick and configurable.
Since lately I stopped geeking and try to make music again so I recently moved to KXStudio since it is just the best pre-configured audio OS at the moment. Since I really don’t like Ubuntu for my own use I’ve instaled Aptosid + pengutronix RT kernel and KXStudio sounds, samples and some plugins and apps like ardour-vst and dssi modules for some synths. For me this is just the perfect configuration. If you don’t have the time to set something up for yourself KXStudio is definatly a nice OS to check out and it comes with the Renoise demo pre-installed.
I was just looking into KXStudio again, wondering, why I neglected it so far and then I realized it again:
“KXStudio uses KDE as the default Session”
Then, one day I try and install KDE which is known for beeing more resource hungry than gnome, I run renoise and it peforms waaaaaaaaaaaay better! I do that trick to increase the period to 3 and that’s it, perfect. No choppy sound with alsa. Try jack, same thing, perfect. […]
Source: Linux, Renoise And Choppy Sound
Yes, concerning the underlying windowmanager kwin might perform better, true, but then again, if it is solely for performance something really light (e.g. openbox) is probably the best solution.
But it is also not the window manager that I do not like about KDE
Forgot to mention this… I use the openbox WM in KDE for it is a lot faster and more stable than kwin in a lot of distributions. In most distro’s you can just install openbox with the packagemanager and then choose the kde/openbox session from the KDM menu or change the default wm to openbox in systemsettings. This way you will have KDE’s functionality and the lichtweight openbox managing your windows. But then again, if the sole purpose of your OS is producing music you’ll get the best performance using something lite like openbox, fluxbox or LXDE since they are a lot less resource intensive by default but a well-tweaked KDE4 can also come very close. I use about 180MB of RAM and 1-2% of my cpu to run my KDE desktop, I’ve got a dual-core intel 1,6ghz with 3GB RAM and never run out of recources when using either Renoise or any other app icw plugins and other apps trough jack.
I’ve quite taken to openbox, it’s pretty cool. IMHO, CPU cycles need to be spent doing something useful (like renoise things) rather than creating flashy desktop environments.
just spent the last week creating a dual-boot between win7 and crunchbang. i need win7 for now until i can get used to crunchbang and mostly get renoise to play nice. on the first test ever, i got some choppy audio. since then, i’ve been looking for a way to get renoise to work.
i’m a total linux newbie so i just learned ‘sudo apt-get install …’ last week. half of the time i only have a faint idea what i am doing, but so far everything is going quite well and i already learned a lot.
this thread, as well as the one concerning using openbox as a window manager, have provided me with the final push into linux territory, and i already love crunchbang. thanks for that, all of you who contributed. hope to read some more tips etc.