This project began from my urges to re-open my home studio, after not doing any production work about 7 years.
I also needed to the learn and further comprehend true multimedia capabilities GNU/Linux and FLOSS applications,
and participate in the establishment of GNU/Linux as Desktop Audio Workstations.
I realized it was best to have a separate workstation for doing midi composition, which didn't require a full
operational Digital Audio Workstation. This was also out of a need for lower power consumption, noise level,
and to make use of some old hardware i had around.
I first tried this out on an laptop due to it's multimedia capabilities in it heyday.
I figured that just for midi recording and playback it would be good enough. Because of hardware resources constraints
i had to carefully choose an OS Platform, so i went ahead with and did my research.
The OS will have to allow me to start with minimal installation, control software installation, and install only what's
needed for its purpose.
This installation process went fine, just couldn't get my wifi cards network to work, so i used a wired card.
I could not get snd-sb8 driver for the soundcard to work at all, even though it is compatible.
I kept getting this error when i view 'dmesg' or 'modprobe snd-sb8'.
sb: can't grab irq 65535
Soundblaster soundcard not found or device busy
I tried alsaconf, manually in /etc/modules, /etc/modprobe.d/, and /etc/modutils. Since audio playback wasn't a
priority on this system, i went ahead anyway.
After going through the whole process, with apps installed and all, while doing initial performance testing,
i fired up rosegarden4 and it dawned on me that size of the LCD was not going to work, because the laptop
monitor highest resolution is 800x600.
Update:
I eventually found out how to get the soundcard on this puppy to work.
In the module options, instead of specifying 'dma=# paramater, or 'dma[0,1,2,]=#'.
I had to specify 'dma8='
For now this is box is now a dedicated for media playback, from local or remote sources with amarok.
It will also be use for VoIP communication one of these days.
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