At this juncture it was Roll My Own, wait until Demudi 1.3.0 is released, use a Gentoo LiveCD Install,
install Windows XP Home.
Guess what, due to hardware constraints, diligent research, and the geek (learning) factor,
i opted to Roll My Own with Debian Testing as the base, a Vanilla Kernel from kernel.org,
Alsa Driver from alsa-project.org for patching, eventually it will become Preemptive, with Low Latency.
I backed up the important configs, documents, and midi compositions to a USB disk,
then proceeded along the path.
By this time i had gotten to know a bit about how the procedure goes. The momentum is to get
the MIDI Workstation going with the Roland Edirol UM-3EX.
I fired up the debian testing net-install cdrom, and started the installation process.
The installation went good and this time around my orinoco gold wifi card was detected and
workable out the box. I stared with a console based installation with no X, KDE, or Gnome installed.
Then i made sure of my system configuration, USB working, WiFi working, Soundcard Detected.
I gradually added the required Lightweight Applications, and a few MIDI Applications and got
this set up and the basic system in good working order. I can browse the web, do online updates,
ssh to other workstations, yuh know, regular day to day stuff.
My next set of tests were for audio playback through the snd-es1968 alsa driver for the soundcard,
i was able to fire up alsamixer, play Cd's, but no sound from wavs, flacs, oggs, or mp3s using audio players.
I was like woh, i checked and double, alsa and oss emulation modules are being loaded, /etc/modules is set up,
made config file and placed it in /etc/modprobe.d/, checked /etc/proc/asound, checked /dev, /dev/snd etc.....
I decided to not stray away from the path and pursued MIDI Workstation.
I downloaded a Kernel-2.6.16.5 from kernel.org, downloaded the Alsa Drivers 1.0.11-rc5 from alsa-project.org,
and downloaded the deb package for Libpam Modules for Low Latency.
I extracted the source packages in /usr/src/, configured the kernel to be preemptive with menuconfig,
patched the kernel alsa driver from 1.0.10 to 1.0.11-rc5, and rebuilt the kernel with make-kpkg.
Building linux kernels have come down to earth for me, especially with debian's make-kpkg and
gentoo's genkernel, you still have to dig in though.
After that surgical procedure i crossed by finger and toes and rebooted.
The system came up good without any errors, and i was able to do my day to day stuff.
Next up was to continue testing sound, same thing Cd's play, no sound from wavs, flacs, oggs, or mp3s.
Fired up qjackctl, rosegarden4, and zynaddsubfx. No synth sound on the PCM channel.
I found this strange, but after diligent research and feeling stupid. I realized that the PCM output channel
on alsamixer was saying 'Item PCM [OFF]' in the upper left hand corner, and i did not know what the
symbols immediately under the channel strips meant. Now i know the mm under the channel strip means
muted and 00 is unmuted. So how do i turn it on, and eventually learned that you have to press M to
turn on or unmute a channel or turn off or mute it by pressing M again on the alsamixer.
I must note here that alsamixer here refers to using it from the command line by typing alsamixer, i have
fallen into the habit of using it like that instead of alsamixer-gui, kamix, gamix, aumix etc.....
Sometime you also have no choice but to open programs that way to see error messages when the won't open,
and it just faster.
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