Hi, due to the lower latency of the 2.6 kernel I have decided to upgrade to FC3. I have setup a test HDD to verify I get all my oddities working before I actually upgrade my very stable FC1 that is currently using jack_fst for VST. Here is what I've learned so far: Ndiswrapper: My SMC2802W Wifi card and Ndiswrapper work with the 8 kb stack coming by default in the Planet CCRMA 2.6.11 kernel. However, to make it work one needs the kernel sources and one needs to _compile_ the kernel, even if the binary is not used, for Ndiswrapper to compile. DSSI Works on the planet FC3 with the 2.6.11 as a synaptic update. wine-20040505 This release is the musicians friend, or at least mine. After install from rpm a link to lind d: to /media/cdrecorder is needed to make it use the CD rom. Also some configuration editing was needed in .wine/config e.g. the temp directory has to be deleted or defined. dssi-vst Does not compile with wine-200503031, 20041201 nor 20040505. No luck here. fst-1.5 Compiles, but copies libfst.so to /usr/local/lib. jack_fst expects libfst.so to be in /usr/lib, so some handy work is needed here to make it work. fst-1.6 Compiles, but install is missing a utility called mkinstalldirs which makes the installation halt. One needs either to copy the mkinstalldirs utility from fst-1.5 or then creage the requested directories by hand for this to install. The install also installs libfst.so to /usr/local/lib while jack_fst expects them to be in /usr/lib. More handywork needed. jack_fst-1.2 Requires wine-20040505 to compile. The Readme file seems to be an implementation note rather than a user document. Jack-fst needs a lot of guessing to make work. One needs the Steinberg SDK files and then one needs to edit one of the jack_fst source files by hand to make it compile. It can be done, but this is really, really ugly. I would have given up unless I would have known I was able to make it work in FC1. Native Instruments B4 organ. This VST instrument is the reason for all this trouble. I have had it working in FC1 for quite a while and I got it working last night with jack_fst and the dependencies also in FC3, which concluded my testing. Conclusions: Making VST work in Linux was very difficult. I never managed make dssi-vst vwork. None of the needed software installed without tweaking and a lot of trial and error. This took a couple of long nights for me, and I have been a Linux user for over 10 years and I have installed jack_fst once earlier. My judgement is that it is quite impossible for the average musician to make VST work under Linux. We need to fix this and lower the threshold for VST under linux. The tools are there, it is the polishing that is missing. When I have the time to update my FC1 I will document every step in notes on how to make VST work with jack_fst and publish them here for public scrutiny. br, Timo
