I have a young bright-eyed, bright-eared 12-year old composition student working on a ASUS EEE-PC netbook. On my advice he switched over to Ubuntu from Windows to do our work. I figured since I'm a veteran Linux user (since 1997!!!) I could help him if he had issues.
He's trying to compose some "musique concrete" style things right now using Ardour, and of course, jack. Mostly it goes smoothly, but he does run into crippling issues more frequently. Two things I want to mention:
1) Ardour works fine as it should 90% of the time, except on a netbook, the windows fail to maximize correctly to available screen real estate (1024x600 I think), e.g., when you scroll down, you get the lowest ardour track leaving video trails, and basically it looks like a huge GTK bug of some sort---the interaction with the pointer of course becomes impossible. On my EEE-PC Arch Linux system I can confirm the same behavior. I know 600 pixels is not a lot to work with when you have all those tracks, but there shouldn't be video freezes and trails of graphical widgets. Seems to me to be a really obvious bug.
2) My student is reporting that at least on his Ubuntu machine, he's having a problem getting sound consistently out of Ardour: sometimes, he says, the mixer seems to randomly disconnect the tracks from the "Master Out" bus, and sometimes he reports that jack misbehaves and that he cannot reconnect to it. I'm going to try to get to the bottom of it, but I can report that I've experienced similar things on rare occasions (Ardour 2.8.7, and jack 0.118.0 on Arch, maybe Ubuntu has other destructive aspects?), although I'm much more able to hack around it, as a Linux beginner, and without my tech support, unfortunately he's had to open Windows and finish his assignments in Cakewalk. Which is of course MOST unfortunate for the cause of great Linux audio software advocacy!
In talking to his Dad today, apparently, taking my advice and doing a 'sudo killall jackd' and restarting jackd and ardour may have worked--I have to confirm this w/Patrick. But this is not an ideal way of working......
Has anyone experienced similar things?
Best,
Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.untwelve.org
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