I have upgraded Ubuntu to latest stable version 8.10 here is my experience for those who are considering upgrading:
ALSA bug introduced in 8.04 (2.6.24 kernel) which caused sound conf to be really special (odd periods) to avoid crackles, is fixed. You can get good sound with most configurations, and go to very low latencies without a problem (5ms or below).
No -rt kernel available. Renoise jack and ardour work fine without it but you may get occasional glitches. Haven’t had any so far. RT kernel may come in near future.
New X makes renoise work a bit faster.
Network manager has better support for 3G/GPRS devices (phones, etc.)
Kernel has many new device drivers, including large collection of soundcards.
Some design has changed, some laptops behave better now (cooler, etc) thanks to ACPI fixes. Many other things you may or may not notice. I’d say it’s better than 8.04 for working with Renoise, but if you are totally sure you need -rt patched kernel then don’t upgrade yet. Most people don’t need it, make sure if you really do.
Guess I’ll wait until a proper rt-kernel is available. But your points mentioned above are making me dribble already !
However, I really wonder if they finally managed to provide some proper drivers for atheros w-lan devices.
I kinda went through hell, to get my wireless working on hardy…
your words have convinced me to upgrade (I didn’t want to because I didn’t see any major improvement which interested me); I have to say that now my laptop fan is much less used, although I was having such kind of problems only since a couple of week for an unknown reason. In general, I have a slightly lower power consumption than I had before the problems started.
finally the Wi-Fi LED is now working and tells if the Wi-Fi is active, but in exchange all the multimedia buttons (browser, e-mail launchers) do not work anymore
The problem may be that you had some custom configuration which the new X version discards. Check the settings in GNOME keyboard configuration and check if the selected keyboard type makes sense.
About the -RT kernel. It is common misunderstanding that -rt kernel gives you BIG advantage. It doesn’t. It gives VERY little difference. Normal kernel also does realtime, but AFAIK it’s not able to preempt some intrakernel processes which may give a little latency in some cases.
It’s generally considered that you don’t need hard realtime for audio, but in very low latencies it may have some benefits, but that usually only applies to some soundcards. With USB cards, most integrated cards and semi pro cards, you can’t go very low latency for other reasons, hard realtime doesn’t help in these cases anyway.
still, having the RT kernel makes a big difference for me on both my desktop and laptop computer while using Renoise, at least until Ubuntu 8.04. I hadn’t the chance to try on 8.10 until now, will do as soon as possible.
Yes, it uses fixed 2.6.26 patch set. But it’s not officially supported thus, all ubuntu additional drivers and stuff like that won’t work, it’s not very good idea to use it, if you depend on them. Atleast as far as I know.
Sorry for raiding the thread, but I have a problem with Ubuntu. I have Jack on and Renoise running through it. Jack shows a CPU usage percentage of around 30-50% and the amount of errors keeps rising all the time. I don’t really know how to set Jack up so it wouldn’t be so “glitchy” and I could run other things alongside Renoise like MIDI and Zynaddsub. My question here is, is my problem incorrect set up of Jack or not having a realtime kernel or something like that? And if it is the rt-kernel, then can I install it without having to install all the software and stuff like that all over again?
Ubuntu is taking the linux world by storm. Not that I know anything about ubuntu or linux, other than about a month ago I bought an asus eee pc that had a linux operating system and when i youtubed around they showed my eee pc can be loaded with ubuntu. So yeah, that’s my story about ubuntu and sorry I used this thread instead of starting my own thread in off topic.
Ubuntu Studio comes with the real-time kernel as It-Alien points out. It’s what I use, and I like it since things tend to work out easily, though I do agree that it has lots of stuff thrown in there – stuff I don’t foresee ever using. Anyway, I recommend it for music makers.
Unfortunately, I’ve got a USB audio interface. I love it so much except for the fact that it has a USB connection (for which ALSA support is yet incomplete). Couldn’t help it… I first bought it when all I had was a small laptop.
It says “Not fully supported. Playback does not work.” Rightly so: it’s hellza choppy. I emailed the developer to see if I can help debug or something… not that I know how to do that yet.
Does it really come with a realtime kernel? I seem to miss it because Renoise announces that it can’t start with RT priority on start.
I tried to install an RT-kernel then (sudo aptitude install linux-rt) but then my PC hung when I tried to boot with the RT-Kernel (which is currently 2.6.27-3-rt).
Most other things are working well here…well, I had to install the networkmanager by hand (packagename: network-manager) to be able to use WLAN and these little things… but beside that I’m happy that it actually runs on my notebook. On the German wiki-pages I had read that the kernel would not support energy-features. Not true, battery management and everything is given here.
The other important thing is - and this goes out to eveyrone who had problems with his ALC268 here - that my microphone is finally working. For a gapless playback you’ll still need to set up at least 3 periods but as mentioned already, beginning with the current Renoise version this is even possible using the ALSA interface.
The sad thing is that I kinda fled from Kubuntu because it forced me to use the unstable KDE4 after the Interpid-update. And it seems that many people got upset about the current KDE4 release.
