... but on the bright side, I got some things working, so it's nice to know that things do work to some extent using the hardware (M-Audio 1010LT, M-Audio DX4 speakers, Pulsar mic + phantom power) I bought and the computer (AMD X2 dual-core, MSI K8N Neo4/SLI mobo, 4GB RAM, GeForce 6600) I got. To get it working I tried some distros since the SuSE Nerd 3 page on how to install a Jacklab system has not the right URLs for YaST. So I tried the 64Studio. This one would not boot after install. I still have to look into that but I want results first, so that's for later. I also tried Musix GNU+Linux Live CD but this one did not recognize the sound card. Results first, so this one is out the door. Then I tried CCRMA. So I downloaded and installed Fedora 5, x86_64 version. Wrong. CCRMA does not seem to have and x86_64 packages. At least not in the mainstream docs. Go back to get another DVD. Luckily, the line has good throughput. So I installed Fedora 5 i386 and followed the CCRMA steps. This finally gives results, I can run jack and connect some ins/outs, make drum beats with Hydrogen, make one sound with this zyn[...] soft synth. MuSE will run, and so Ardour. So basically now all I have to do is to learn how to use this stuff (and connect a MIDI keyboard and connect my preamped accoustic bass guitar). It would be that if only Fedora would have nice fonts. It does not. The screen feeling is set a few years back. Then it tells me that the screen is 1600x1200 but the other screen resolution app is right: it's only 1024x768. Even tough it knows the right monitor model. No way to easily throw this one in 1600x1200. So I want to boot back into my main SuSE system. And although I've taken care to tell the Fedora installer about the other boot partitions, it throws the system into the grub prompt when trying to boot SuSE. So it's back to booting from the SuSE DVD, chroot into the right partition and re-initialize grub. I'd thought that by 2006, big guys like the Fedora team would have resolved this. SuSE certainly did (64Studio not !). It's this feeling about systems and flakiness that I almost forgotten not working with Windows for several years. So for now 1024x768 will do so that I learn a bit more about actually how to work with audio (as opposed to configuring systems and software packages) and perhaps derive a bit of fun in the process, but this is certainly not a long term solution. Al
