Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On Wednesday 28 September 2005 23:44, Holly Bostick wrote: Tony Davison schreef: On Wednesday 28 September 2005 20:33, Holly Bostick wrote: I'm sitting here with my jaw on the floor. much snippage This is a gigantic leap from the previous versions I've used, and I think I've just switched WMs. Obviously there's been a huge shakeup somewhere, but the site doesn't say anything about it, that I saw. Does anybody happen to follow development of this and know what happened? I'm just stunned (in a good way). OK I'll bite but does anyone know how to get KDE to play nicely with it. I've b*d about with the ksmserver bit of startkde until I thoroughly broke it but when it aint broke it resolutely refuses to have anything to do with any wm apart fron kwin or KDEWM. Stumped, on my last cig and this wheelchair has no lights. Sorry-- that's one of the reasons I use GDM (even under KDE, but I use KDE very very rarely). What I would think is that you'd want to copy the fvwm-crystal.desktop file from /usr/share/xsessions to /usr/kde/3.4/share/apps/kdm/sessions so that it appears as a choice in KDM. Why you'd expect the *startkde* script to start anything other than KDE rather eludes me, I must admit. :) Its OK I got it working impressive it is. With the last gasp of my grey cells last night I emerged GDM (I only had XDM on this system) and lo there it was. As for startkde, I was guilty of reading the FVWM FAQ :-) -- Tony Davison [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On 9/28/05, Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Great. Tried it. It worked fine and didn't upset Jack which means my experiment goes on. This is working so much better for me than Gnome on my AMD64 box. I'll have to go back and try the standard Gentoo kernel instead of ck-sources. Thanks for turning me on to this WM and for your help. cheers, Mark In the end the xruns came back so FVWM-Crystal didn't magically solve my problems. (unfortunately...) My quest goes on. Now running 2.6.14-rc2-mm1, looking for 2.6.14-rc2-mm1-rt6 - Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
Mark Knecht schreef: On 9/28/05, Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Great. Tried it. It worked fine and didn't upset Jack which means my experiment goes on. This is working so much better for me than Gnome on my AMD64 box. I'll have to go back and try the standard Gentoo kernel instead of ck-sources. snip In the end the xruns came back so FVWM-Crystal didn't magically solve my problems. (unfortunately...) My quest goes on. Now running 2.6.14-rc2-mm1, looking for 2.6.14-rc2-mm1-rt6 Am I the only one who doesn't know what are 'xruns'? Whatever they are, it would seem that the problem can be minimized, but not eliminated by choice of WM, but obviously we couldn't go any further in actually eliminating them without knowing what they are (or at least I couldn't, since I don't actually know what you're referring to). Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On 9/29/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mark Knecht schreef: On 9/28/05, Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Great. Tried it. It worked fine and didn't upset Jack which means my experiment goes on. This is working so much better for me than Gnome on my AMD64 box. I'll have to go back and try the standard Gentoo kernel instead of ck-sources. snip In the end the xruns came back so FVWM-Crystal didn't magically solve my problems. (unfortunately...) My quest goes on. Now running 2.6.14-rc2-mm1, looking for 2.6.14-rc2-mm1-rt6 Am I the only one who doesn't know what are 'xruns'? Whatever they are, it would seem that the problem can be minimized, but not eliminated by choice of WM, but obviously we couldn't go any further in actually eliminating them without knowing what they are (or at least I couldn't, since I don't actually know what you're referring to). Holly Holly, I'm so very sorry. Of course you would have no reason to know about xruns if you are not part of the Linux audio community. My apologies. One of the Linux 'methods', if you will, for moving audio between sound cards and applications is a server called Jack (jackd) which is supplied by emerging jack-audio-connection-kit. Jack provides for the movement of digital audio between a sound card and essentially an unlimited number of apps (really 'ports') with a known latency. It's the latency that's really important to those of us doing live recording. If I'm listening to a piano and recording my guitar then I need the two to sound like they are in time or it is virtually impossible to play a part correctly. An 'xrun', standing I think for overrun - go figure - is when something in the system has not taken or delivered digital audio at the agreed upon time. This leads to clicks and pops. If you were to look at the waveform in an oscilloscope there would be some sort of discontinuity. With my 32-bit machines I have been blessed. I have been able, for at least the last year, to run the standard Gentoo kernel at 3mS latency with no xruns. I've been writing and recording music on Gentoo and had no problems while others running on other distros have had to build specialized kernels utilizing patches from Andrew Morton and Ingo Molnar to get equivalent results. On guy in Australia didn't really beleive me so I helped him build a Gentoo box over the net. When that machien came up it worked so well, with the standard kernel, that he converted all the machines in his studio to Gentoo and no brags about how stable his environment is. I looked forward to such an experience with my new AMD64 machine. It did not come to be true. Every 64-bit kernel I've tried so far either has terrible xrun problems or will not build. This includes: gentoo-sources - xruns ck-sources - xruns kernel.org - 2.6.13.3 2.6.14-rc2 - xruns 2.6.14-rc2-rt6 - Ingo's patches - won't build I'm currently running 2.6.14-rc2-mm1 - with Andrew Morton's patches. I have not yet tested it but at least it built. The major change to the kernel to get better real time results is (apparently) to make pretty much everything preemptable. When Ingo's patches are added then a new preemption model shows up in make menuconfig. Unfortunately for me it won't build on 64-bit yet, at least for me. The window manager choice is just one choice those of us playing with low latency audio make. KDE has never worked well for me. Gnome has been fine for the last year until this new AMD64 experience. In the old days we used fluxbox over KDE and Gnome and got good, but not great, results. Anyway, I hope that helps explain my xrun comments. Cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
Mark Knecht schreef: On 9/29/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mark Knecht schreef: On 9/28/05, Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Great. Tried it. It worked fine and didn't upset Jack which means my experiment goes on. This is working so much better for me than Gnome on my AMD64 box. I'll have to go back and try the standard Gentoo kernel instead of ck-sources. snip In the end the xruns came back so FVWM-Crystal didn't magically solve my problems. (unfortunately...) My quest goes on. Now running 2.6.14-rc2-mm1, looking for 2.6.14-rc2-mm1-rt6 Am I the only one who doesn't know what are 'xruns'? Whatever they are, it would seem that the problem can be minimized, but not eliminated by choice of WM, but obviously we couldn't go any further in actually eliminating them without knowing what they are (or at least I couldn't, since I don't actually know what you're referring to). Holly Holly, I'm so very sorry. Of course you would have no reason to know about xruns if you are not part of the Linux audio community. My apologies. One of the Linux 'methods', if you will, for moving audio between sound cards and applications is a server called Jack (jackd) which is supplied by emerging jack-audio-connection-kit. Jack provides for the movement of digital audio between a sound card and essentially an unlimited number of apps (really 'ports') with a known latency. It's the latency that's really important to those of us doing live recording. If I'm listening to a piano and recording my guitar then I need the two to sound like they are in time or it is virtually impossible to play a part correctly. An 'xrun', standing I think for overrun - go figure - is when something in the system has not taken or delivered digital audio at the agreed upon time. This leads to clicks and pops. If you were to look at the waveform in an oscilloscope there would be some sort of discontinuity. With my 32-bit machines I have been blessed. I have been able, for at least the last year, to run the standard Gentoo kernel at 3mS latency with no xruns. I've been writing and recording music on Gentoo and had no problems while others running on other distros have had to build specialized kernels utilizing patches from Andrew Morton and Ingo Molnar to get equivalent results. On guy in Australia didn't really beleive me so I helped him build a Gentoo box over the net. When that machien came up it worked so well, with the standard kernel, that he converted all the machines in his studio to Gentoo and no brags about how stable his environment is. I looked forward to such an experience with my new AMD64 machine. It did not come to be true. Every 64-bit kernel I've tried so far either has terrible xrun problems or will not build. This includes: gentoo-sources - xruns ck-sources - xruns kernel.org - 2.6.13.3 2.6.14-rc2 - xruns 2.6.14-rc2-rt6 - Ingo's patches - won't build I'm currently running 2.6.14-rc2-mm1 - with Andrew Morton's patches. I have not yet tested it but at least it built. The major change to the kernel to get better real time results is (apparently) to make pretty much everything preemptable. When Ingo's patches are added then a new preemption model shows up in make menuconfig. Unfortunately for me it won't build on 64-bit yet, at least for me. The window manager choice is just one choice those of us playing with low latency audio make. KDE has never worked well for me. Gnome has been fine for the last year until this new AMD64 experience. In the old days we used fluxbox over KDE and Gnome and got good, but not great, results. Anyway, I hope that helps explain my xrun comments. OK, sorry not to snip, but your post is a continuous thought/explanation, and it doesn't seem right-- and I don't top-post (99% of the time). I have several questions mostly leading to the same ultimate end. But only one is important to express: 1) do you actually need X? i.e., is it possible to record audio in the manner that you do without it? What occurs to me, looking in from outside, is that while your issues are clearly known to be kernel-based, and 64-bit based, the fact that you are using programs that interfere with latency/real-time issues is obfuscating the entire problem. Certainly if the choice of window managers has an effect on the severity of the problem. So clear the waters if you can, because you can't solve a problem that you can't clearly see the outlines of. Can you record audio from the command line? Or do the X-based programs you use run under DirectFB? What I'm getting at is getting rid of all the obstructions that could possibly interfere with the kernel and introduce even more latency issues than what it already has, so that you (or any devs) can see what problems it already has distinctly enough to solve them-- or to eliminate them sufficiently so that you can get on with doing what you do
RE: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
Were I you, I would consider: - If keeping X, switching to the absolute most minimal wm possible (twm, ratpoison, ion), to see what effect that had. - If downstepping from X, investigating what programs run under DirectFB and seeing what effect that had. - If going cold-turkey off X, seeing how far you get with the command-line and ncurses programs. I would also add the following: remoting X. X is a hog, as Holly said, but there's no reason the X server would need to run on the same box as the ongoing recording session. Running two systems, one running X and handling the gui operations, and one running your audio apps, might provide enough of the separation to reduce the latency on the audio box. Of course the two cards should probably be connected with at least a 100mb Ethernet connection (to eliminate the overhead of dealing with the network conversations for X). Another possibility might be your choice of filesystems (assuming the recordings are going to disk). Different filesystems have inherent latency based upon their design - journaling adds overhead, btree maintenance in reiser adds overhead, etc. Just using a simple ext2 filesystem for the initial recording followed by backups to a modern filesystem may have a measurable impact. Going back to X, it is a hog both in cpu cycles and in memory; you mention having an amd64 but no quotes on memory. My assumption is that such a system has a big chunk of memory, but I've learned what happens when one assumes. Obviously a lack of sufficient memory can cause you some swapping issues whether you were aware of it or not. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On 9/29/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: SNIP Anyway, I hope that helps explain my xrun comments. OK, sorry not to snip, but your post is a continuous thought/explanation, and it doesn't seem right-- and I don't top-post (99% of the time). I have several questions mostly leading to the same ultimate end. But only one is important to express: 1) do you actually need X? i.e., is it possible to record audio in the manner that you do without it? I need X. I run Ardour as well as a number of other audio gui apps. http://www.ardour.org/ What occurs to me, looking in from outside, is that while your issues are clearly known to be kernel-based, and 64-bit based, the fact that you are using programs that interfere with latency/real-time issues is obfuscating the entire problem. Certainly if the choice of window managers has an effect on the severity of the problem. Certainly. And this is not the first time I've been through this having now been using Linux audio for 4 years. Belive me, I've had many machines that didn't work for a while. This experience is not an exception - it's pretty much the rule. Clearly though, in my mind, this current problem is one of two things: 1) The recent kernel's are known to produce good results on 32-bit machines while running X. Unfortunately the current patch sets are not building for me as a 64-bit kernel. This could be because of configuration chices I'm making or somethign else. The kernel patch developers will eventually catch up to my issues and things will improve. 2) There is a specific hardware or driver problem with the NForce4 motherboard. Possibly the motherboard doesn't work well, or possibly the drivers have some problems. The former is not desired. The later will get attention eventually. So clear the waters if you can, because you can't solve a problem that you can't clearly see the outlines of. Can you record audio from the command line? Or do the X-based programs you use run under DirectFB? What I'm getting at is getting rid of all the obstructions that could possibly interfere with the kernel and introduce even more latency issues than what it already has, so that you (or any devs) can see what problems it already has distinctly enough to solve them-- or to eliminate them sufficiently so that you can get on with doing what you do until the kernel stabilizes so you can use it normally. Good questions. I didn't say this earlier. I probably should have. If I boot this machine into a console mode (i.e. - no xdm/gdm) and run Jack in one console I can log in as root in another console, do emerges all day long and I get no xruns, at least with the small amount of testing I've done so far. This is using 2.6.14-rc2-mm1 so it has some new code but not all of Ingo's stuff. I mean, X is a horrible hog, heaven only knows what effect your nVidia or ATI kernel modules may be having on the ability of the kernel to behave properly, since they also make demands on the kernel that 'distract' it, as it were. And if Jack is a daemon (which I know it is), it's not like it needs X for itself. Right, but as I say, much slower PCs are able to use the standard Gentoo kernel and run Gnome with no xruns. It's only this 3GHz 64-bit machine that has the problem. The sound card has been used in an Athlon XP 1600+ machine and it works fine so I trust its drivers at least in 32-bit mode. It's of course quite possible that I'm talking out of my butt, Not the least bit possible. Your thought are clear and very coorect IMO. since I am not a member of the Linux audio community, but I do know that the first step in troubleshooting is to simplify the environment as much as possible, and then slowly increase the complexity to see when and where things break down. Absolutely. Hopefully with the additional info above you'll see that is what I've been doing, within my limited abilities to patch kernels, etc. Were I you, I would consider: - If keeping X, switching to the absolute most minimal wm possible (twm, ratpoison, ion), to see what effect that had. Right. FVWM, fluxbox, etc. These can just be tested. - If downstepping from X, investigating what programs run under DirectFB and seeing what effect that had. - If going cold-turkey off X, seeing how far you get with the command-line and ncurses programs. Neither are really acceptable as far as I know today. Am I, in fact, talking out of my butt (since it seems that the 'real' audio community would have tried at least some of this)? Or are there reasons that this simplification process is not possible for professional audio recording? As above - see Ardour, Jamin, Muse, Rosegarden, etc. Thanks for your thoughts. They are helpful. Cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On 9/29/05, Dave Nebinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Were I you, I would consider: - If keeping X, switching to the absolute most minimal wm possible (twm, ratpoison, ion), to see what effect that had. - If downstepping from X, investigating what programs run under DirectFB and seeing what effect that had. - If going cold-turkey off X, seeing how far you get with the command-line and ncurses programs. I would also add the following: remoting X. X is a hog, as Holly said, but there's no reason the X server would need to run on the same box as the ongoing recording session. Running two systems, one running X and handling the gui operations, and one running your audio apps, might provide enough of the separation to reduce the latency on the audio box. Of course the two cards should probably be connected with at least a 100mb Ethernet connection (to eliminate the overhead of dealing with the network conversations for X). This is an interesting idea actually. I currently run two boxes anyway. All audio is connected between them using ADAT optical (i.e. - red laser) or spdif so I've got 26 digital audio channels going across. Maybe running remotely could solve some of this. Thanks. Another possibility might be your choice of filesystems (assuming the recordings are going to disk). Different filesystems have inherent latency based upon their design - journaling adds overhead, btree maintenance in reiser adds overhead, etc. Just using a simple ext2 filesystem for the initial recording followed by backups to a modern filesystem may have a measurable impact. In fact it does. I wrote a short online paper about that a few years ago. I use ext3. Going back to X, it is a hog both in cpu cycles and in memory; you mention having an amd64 but no quotes on memory. My assumption is that such a system has a big chunk of memory, but I've learned what happens when one assumes. Obviously a lack of sufficient memory can cause you some swapping issues whether you were aware of it or not. Thisis a good point also. The machine has 512MB. This has been more than enough on my previous 32-bit machines, but on this AMD64 running the Gentoo 64-bit kernel it seems that memory usage is significantly higher. On the 32-bit machine I seem to use about 300-350MB by the time I have Gnome up and maybe Firefox open. I alomost have never seen swapping. On the AMD64 I'm seeing 450-500MB and a small amount of swapping every day. I'm unclear about the 64-bit environment anyway. OK, it's 64-bit, but I also have a pile of emulation libraries emerged to take care of dependencies. I don't know when they are getting used, except for the 32-bit Firefox I'm running so that I get more multimedia stuff. Anyway, more memory may well be a good thing to do. Thanks for the ideas. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
050928 Holly Bostick wrote: I'm sitting here with my jaw on the floor. -- snip -- I had installed FVWM-Crystal which I thought was very pretty I upgraded and just now booted into it It works...! It's gorgeous...! I'm just stunned (in a good way). Finding software which really suits you is a lot like finding a lover/church. Aristotle describes the phenomenon in detail in books 9-10 of his Ethics. -- ,, SUPPORT ___//___, Philip Webb : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Centre for Urban Community Studies TRANSIT`-O--O---' University of Toronto -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On 9/29/05, Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 9/29/05, Dave Nebinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Were I you, I would consider: - If keeping X, switching to the absolute most minimal wm possible (twm, ratpoison, ion), to see what effect that had. - If downstepping from X, investigating what programs run under DirectFB and seeing what effect that had. - If going cold-turkey off X, seeing how far you get with the command-line and ncurses programs. I would also add the following: remoting X. X is a hog, as Holly said, but there's no reason the X server would need to run on the same box as the ongoing recording session. Running two systems, one running X and handling the gui operations, and one running your audio apps, might provide enough of the separation to reduce the latency on the audio box. Of course the two cards should probably be connected with at least a 100mb Ethernet connection (to eliminate the overhead of dealing with the network conversations for X). This is an interesting idea actually. I currently run two boxes anyway. All audio is connected between them using ADAT optical (i.e. - red laser) or spdif so I've got 26 digital audio channels going across. Maybe running remotely could solve some of this. Thanks. Well, interesting, but not the solution. I'm logged into Lightning, the AMD64 machine, remotely in two terminals. One terminal is running QJackCtl, a small X app that allows me to start and stop the Jack server, along with make connections, etc. In a second terminal I log in as root and start an emerge of a couple of things that don't get built - a new kernel tree and firefox-bin. I don't immediately get xruns, but when heavy disk operations start I do. Some of the xruns are over 100mS - absolutely huge when you're trying to run at 3mS! What's interesting to me is that I Can stream a movie from the EIDE DVD drive on this machine and never create an xrun, but as soon as I start using the SATA drive I do. That seems to be a pretty good clue I think. It's a good idea though. I'll keep looking into it. Cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
Mark Knecht schreef: Can you record audio from the command line? Or do the X-based programs you use run under DirectFB? What I'm getting at is getting rid of all the obstructions that could possibly interfere with the kernel and introduce even more latency issues than what it already has snip Good questions. I didn't say this earlier. I probably should have. If I boot this machine into a console mode (i.e. - no xdm/gdm) and run Jack in one console I can log in as root in another console, do emerges all day long and I get no xruns, at least with the small amount of testing I've done so far. This is using 2.6.14-rc2-mm1 so it has some new code but not all of Ingo's stuff. OK, so X really is a problem, then. Now I really want to find a way to get you rid of it. I mean, X is a horrible hog, heaven only knows what effect your nVidia or ATI kernel modules may be having on the ability of the kernel to behave properly, since they also make demands on the kernel that 'distract' it, as it were. And if Jack is a daemon (which I know it is), it's not like it needs X for itself. Right, but as I say, much slower PCs are able to use the standard Gentoo kernel and run Gnome with no xruns. It's only this 3GHz 64-bit machine that has the problem. The sound card has been used in an Athlon XP 1600+ machine and it works fine so I trust its drivers at least in 32-bit mode. Honestly, we don't care what much slower PCs can do, because this isn't one of them, and we don't think there's something wrong with the sound card. The issue is that this particular machine is a 64 bit one that apparently needs special handling in order to minimize the pre-existing latency issues with 64-bit kernels/drivers/environments so that you can use it for what you intend to use it for. Other conditions are irrelevant, imo. It's of course quite possible that I'm talking out of my butt, Not the least bit possible. Your thought are clear and very coorect IMO. :-) since I am not a member of the Linux audio community, but I do know that the first step in troubleshooting is to simplify the environment as much as possible, and then slowly increase the complexity to see when and where things break down. Absolutely. Hopefully with the additional info above you'll see that is what I've been doing, within my limited abilities to patch kernels, etc. Patching the kernel isn't simplifying the environment if you're piling possibly unnecessary additional demands on the kernel. The X server runs on top of the kernel. The window manager runs on top of the X server, which runs on top of the kernel. The whole thing is rather like a head wound (the premise being that even non-serious head wounds tend to heavy bleeding, obscuring the nature and severity of the wound itself). The use of the X server, and anything but the lightest possible WM puts additional stress on the system, which may be the straw that breaks the camel's back in this case. Were I you, I would consider: - If keeping X, switching to the absolute most minimal wm possible (twm, ratpoison, ion), to see what effect that had. Right. FVWM, fluxbox, etc. These can just be tested. No, I really mean twm, ratpoison, ion and the like. FVWM can be configured to be absolutely minimal, but learning to do that is an unreasonable distraction. Fluxbox uses too much X (has to draw toolbars and tabs and decorative windows). Even openbox might, and I don't know enough about pekwm or kahakai to know if they would be appropriate. If you must use X (which I will accept for the moment) for the GUI applications, well, fine, but what I'm suggesting is a window manager that uses the absolute minimum of X resources possible. - If downstepping from X, investigating what programs run under DirectFB and seeing what effect that had. - If going cold-turkey off X, seeing how far you get with the command-line and ncurses programs. Neither are really acceptable as far as I know today. Am I, in fact, talking out of my butt (since it seems that the 'real' audio community would have tried at least some of this)? Or are there reasons that this simplification process is not possible for professional audio recording? As above - see Ardour, Jamin, Muse, Rosegarden, etc. I'm not completely convinced that Ardour, Jamin, Muse and Rosegarden won't run under DirectFB, but I'm not so experienced with DirectFB that I can say definitively one way or the other. I see that at least Muse does have an ncurses interface (or at least an ncurses USE flag which would suggest that it has an ncurses interface). And looking at the DirectFB site, it seems possible that there could be a place for it to help work around the issue: FusionSound Audio sub system for multiple applications FusionSound is a very powerful audio sub system in the manner of DirectFB and a technical demonstration of Fusion. FusionSound supports multiple
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On 9/29/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mark Knecht schreef: Can you record audio from the command line? Or do the X-based programs you use run under DirectFB? What I'm getting at is getting rid of all the obstructions that could possibly interfere with the kernel and introduce even more latency issues than what it already has snip Good questions. I didn't say this earlier. I probably should have. If I boot this machine into a console mode (i.e. - no xdm/gdm) and run Jack in one console I can log in as root in another console, do emerges all day long and I get no xruns, at least with the small amount of testing I've done so far. This is using 2.6.14-rc2-mm1 so it has some new code but not all of Ingo's stuff. OK, so X really is a problem, then. Now I really want to find a way to get you rid of it. In the meantime, following along on Dave's idea about running remotely I now have Ardour running at 64/2. (sub 3mS) No xruns yet. 1) On Lightning I boot without X and start Jack in a console. 2) On my remote machine some audio apps are failing with lots of 'BadAtom messages, but if I log into Lightning using ssh -Y lightning ardour then ardour comes up remotely and seems to be working fine. I've run a couple of sessions, and at least in playback no xruns yet. I'm also playing oggs from a 1394 drive and have hdspmixer running. My issue right now is this is a lot of network traffic and this room only has a hub so I'm off to pick up a cheap switch at lunch. I still see a lot of memory usage. That concerns me a bit. You make some very good points below. I'll come back later today and spend some time thinking and answering them. For now let me say that I have 1% of the experience you do with FB solutions (I've NEVER used it) so that's a whole new area for me to look at, but it could be interesting. More later, and thanks very much to you and Dave. I'm not done here. Cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On Wednesday 28 September 2005 20:33, Holly Bostick wrote: I'm sitting here with my jaw on the floor. much snippage This is a gigantic leap from the previous versions I've used, and I think I've just switched WMs. Obviously there's been a huge shakeup somewhere, but the site doesn't say anything about it, that I saw. Does anybody happen to follow development of this and know what happened? I'm just stunned (in a good way). OK I'll bite but does anyone know how to get KDE to play nicely with it. I've b*d about with the ksmserver bit of startkde until I thoroughly broke it but when it aint broke it resolutely refuses to have anything to do with any wm apart fron kwin or KDEWM. Stumped, on my last cig and this wheelchair has no lights. -- Tony Davison [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
Mark Knecht schreef: Hi Holly, I thought that if you liked it that much I thought I might as well take a look. I've emerged it. It's running. Nice. It seems to start esd by default. I'd need to turn that off. More embedded below and at the end. - Mark On 9/28/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm sitting here with my jaw on the floor. SNIP I upgraded and just now booted into it, which is why I'm sitting with my jaw on the floor. Cover it if you're still spreading germs! ;-) It works...! It's gorgeous...! It's now running on my AMD64 machine and it is quite pretty. The new site is up, and it's in English...! (no docs yet, though, as far as I saw.) I changed my layout to dock (which looks a lot like XFCE, but all transparent), and when I click on one of the icons-- let's say the OO.o icon, a menu that actually has all my word processing programs appears! The Firefox icon menu shows all my 'interact with the web' apps, and the thunderbird icon menu has all my 'communicate with others' programs. OK, maybe not quite all of them, but almost. More than enough to get along with and give me some choice (I have multiple alternatives applications for some types of usage situations), and enough to see that 1) both KDE and GNOME menu listings are being read, and 2) applications are being recognized and sorted reasonably appropriately. I probably will want to customize it a bit further, but on the whole, I would say it JustWorks-- it's certainly useable for me, as is, out of the box. Which is unbelievable, for any variant of FVWM, imo. I don't quite see this part. Maybe I haven't found them yet. It's only been runnign 10 minutes or so. Use the diamond icon in the upper right corner to get the menu, then Preferences=Used Recipe (layouts are now called Recipes) and choose Dock. Avoid Clean Vertical, as that seems to only use a pager, no menu, no panel, no taskbar-- and I had to edit a config file to change recipes again, since I haven't configured for just a term setup, and I don't know what term-based commands I have available to control this setup. I also changed the button layout to Windows-style-- one thing I never liked about Crystal was that you can't click the close button and just close the stupid program (without reconfiguring), and having to go through that ^%$#% menu to 'Iconify Close Destroy' was making me nuts. One thing I do not see is my special little application drawers I had on my Gnome panel. Not a biggie... I would imagine that you can create them if the provided drawers are not sufficient-- this is, after all, still FVWM. I just don't know how to do it yet, but the config seems like it might be more manageable than 'regular' FVWM, if the one file I've looked at is any indication. There were some setup instructions at the very end: * * After installation, execute following commands: * $ cp -r /usr/share/fvwm-crystal/addons/Xresources ~/.Xresources * $ cp -r /usr/share/fvwm-crystal/addons/Xsession ~/.xinitrc * * Authors of fvwm-crystal recommend also installing * the following applications: * app-admin/gkrellm * app-misc/rox * media-gfx/scrot * x11-misc/xlockmore * x11-misc/xpad * x11-misc/xscreensaver * x11-terms/aterm * How much of this did you do? I've done none and it's running. I didn't do any either-- I didn't even notice it, so thanks for the heads-up. I probably do want at least to copy .Xresources. Most of these applications I already have installed, and the ones I don't, I don't want. I actually don't want a couple of the ones I do have installed, notably rox, which I cannot find it in me to like. I will have a look at scrot, though-- don't know what it is, but media-gfx programs always bear further examination. Quite nice. I went back by the site, and it looks like its the same developer, he's just rewritten everything. His time has been well-spent. I'll have to drop him a note. Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
Tony Davison schreef: On Wednesday 28 September 2005 20:33, Holly Bostick wrote: I'm sitting here with my jaw on the floor. much snippage This is a gigantic leap from the previous versions I've used, and I think I've just switched WMs. Obviously there's been a huge shakeup somewhere, but the site doesn't say anything about it, that I saw. Does anybody happen to follow development of this and know what happened? I'm just stunned (in a good way). OK I'll bite but does anyone know how to get KDE to play nicely with it. I've b*d about with the ksmserver bit of startkde until I thoroughly broke it but when it aint broke it resolutely refuses to have anything to do with any wm apart fron kwin or KDEWM. Stumped, on my last cig and this wheelchair has no lights. Sorry-- that's one of the reasons I use GDM (even under KDE, but I use KDE very very rarely). What I would think is that you'd want to copy the fvwm-crystal.desktop file from /usr/share/xsessions to /usr/kde/3.4/share/apps/kdm/sessions so that it appears as a choice in KDM. Why you'd expect the *startkde* script to start anything other than KDE rather eludes me, I must admit. :) Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On 9/28/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mark Knecht schreef: Hi Holly, I thought that if you liked it that much I thought I might as well take a look. I've emerged it. It's running. Nice. It seems to start esd by default. I'd need to turn that off. More embedded below and at the end. - Mark On 9/28/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm sitting here with my jaw on the floor. SNIP I upgraded and just now booted into it, which is why I'm sitting with my jaw on the floor. Cover it if you're still spreading germs! ;-) It works...! It's gorgeous...! It's now running on my AMD64 machine and it is quite pretty. The new site is up, and it's in English...! (no docs yet, though, as far as I saw.) I changed my layout to dock (which looks a lot like XFCE, but all transparent), and when I click on one of the icons-- let's say the OO.o icon, a menu that actually has all my word processing programs appears! The Firefox icon menu shows all my 'interact with the web' apps, and the thunderbird icon menu has all my 'communicate with others' programs. OK, maybe not quite all of them, but almost. More than enough to get along with and give me some choice (I have multiple alternatives applications for some types of usage situations), and enough to see that 1) both KDE and GNOME menu listings are being read, and 2) applications are being recognized and sorted reasonably appropriately. I probably will want to customize it a bit further, but on the whole, I would say it JustWorks-- it's certainly useable for me, as is, out of the box. Which is unbelievable, for any variant of FVWM, imo. I don't quite see this part. Maybe I haven't found them yet. It's only been runnign 10 minutes or so. Use the diamond icon in the upper right corner to get the menu, then Preferences=Used Recipe (layouts are now called Recipes) and choose Dock. Avoid Clean Vertical, as that seems to only use a pager, no menu, no panel, no taskbar-- and I had to edit a config file to change recipes again, since I haven't configured for just a term setup, and I don't know what term-based commands I have available to control this setup. OK, thanks. I selected Dock. It wants me to restart. Can I do this within FVWM without exiting? I think I could in fluxbox. Right now I'm running a very, very successful audio experiment. Been running Jack for about an hour. I have Aqualung hooked up and playing audio from a 1394 drive. At the same time I'm running xine and playing 'Panic Room'. So far not a single xrun in Jack, at least at 11mS. This has been a big problem for me in Gnome on AMD64. FVWM looks like it might be a better audio environment for me on this box. I also changed the button layout to Windows-style-- one thing I never liked about Crystal was that you can't click the close button and just close the stupid program (without reconfiguring), and having to go through that ^%$#% menu to 'Iconify Close Destroy' was making me nuts. I chose this also. I'm still having some trouble with raising windows to the top. I like to click anywhere within a window and it comes to the top. Also I like to use Alt-Tab to rotate. It seems to work most of the time but not always, at least so far. Minor annoyance as it's probably fixable. One thing I do not see is my special little application drawers I had on my Gnome panel. Not a biggie... I would imagine that you can create them if the provided drawers are not sufficient-- this is, after all, still FVWM. I just don't know how to do it yet, but the config seems like it might be more manageable than 'regular' FVWM, if the one file I've looked at is any indication. There were some setup instructions at the very end: * * After installation, execute following commands: * $ cp -r /usr/share/fvwm-crystal/addons/Xresources ~/.Xresources * $ cp -r /usr/share/fvwm-crystal/addons/Xsession ~/.xinitrc * * Authors of fvwm-crystal recommend also installing * the following applications: * app-admin/gkrellm * app-misc/rox * media-gfx/scrot * x11-misc/xlockmore * x11-misc/xpad * x11-misc/xscreensaver * x11-terms/aterm * How much of this did you do? I've done none and it's running. I didn't do any either-- I didn't even notice it, so thanks for the heads-up. I probably do want at least to copy .Xresources. Most of these applications I already have installed, and the ones I don't, I don't want. I actually don't want a couple of the ones I do have installed, notably rox, which I cannot find it in me to like. I will have a look at scrot, though-- don't know what it is, but media-gfx programs always bear further examination. Yeah, I'll look at these later myself. Quite nice. I went back by the site, and it looks like its the same developer, he's just rewritten everything. His time has been well-spent. I'll have to drop him a note. Holly Send it from
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
Mark Knecht schreef: On 9/28/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mark Knecht schreef: I changed my layout to dock (which looks a lot like XFCE, but all transparent) I don't quite see this part. Maybe I haven't found them yet. It's only been runnign 10 minutes or so. Use the diamond icon in the upper right corner to get the menu, then Preferences=Used Recipe (layouts are now called Recipes) and choose Dock. Avoid Clean Vertical, as that seems to only use a pager, no menu, no panel, no taskbar-- and I had to edit a config file to change recipes again, since I haven't configured for just a term setup, and I don't know what term-based commands I have available to control this setup. OK, thanks. I selected Dock. It wants me to restart. Can I do this within FVWM without exiting? Yes, restart is an internal command that just restarts fvwm without logging out or closing any open applications or anything like that. I assume if you chose 'not now' that it would change the setting in the config file, but not do anything until you logged out and back in, or used the internal restart command in the fvwm console, which I don't know how to access in Crystal (as opposed to 'regular' fvwm). Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!
On 9/28/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mark Knecht schreef: On 9/28/05, Holly Bostick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mark Knecht schreef: I changed my layout to dock (which looks a lot like XFCE, but all transparent) I don't quite see this part. Maybe I haven't found them yet. It's only been runnign 10 minutes or so. Use the diamond icon in the upper right corner to get the menu, then Preferences=Used Recipe (layouts are now called Recipes) and choose Dock. Avoid Clean Vertical, as that seems to only use a pager, no menu, no panel, no taskbar-- and I had to edit a config file to change recipes again, since I haven't configured for just a term setup, and I don't know what term-based commands I have available to control this setup. OK, thanks. I selected Dock. It wants me to restart. Can I do this within FVWM without exiting? Yes, restart is an internal command that just restarts fvwm without logging out or closing any open applications or anything like that. I assume if you chose 'not now' that it would change the setting in the config file, but not do anything until you logged out and back in, or used the internal restart command in the fvwm console, which I don't know how to access in Crystal (as opposed to 'regular' fvwm). Holly Great. Tried it. It worked fine and didn't upset Jack which means my experiment goes on. This is working so much better for me than Gnome on my AMD64 box. I'll have to go back and try the standard Gentoo kernel instead of ck-sources. Thanks for turning me on to this WM and for your help. cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
