I have a laptop and a desktop, both running the latest Ubuntu.
Laptop is 2 GHz Pentium M, 2G memory
Desktop is 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 492M memory (could be expanded to 2G easily enough if I needed to)
The desktop is hooked up to my USB mixer and studio monitors and it acts as a file server, SSH server, etc. (In other words, it was originally going to be headless, but I never ended up removing the $8 thrift store monitor.) The monitor is barely ever turned on. I access it remotely through ssh, ssh -X, NX, or VNC. I run Rhythmbox through ssh -X, for instance, so the sound comes out of the monitors.
I use my laptop for all my daily stuff. It has a better screen (obviously) and is set up more as a desktop system than a dedicated server.
I’d like to control Ardour on the laptop screen, and have sound come out of the monitors. I know of two ways to do this:
- ssh -fX desktop ardour2
- netjack
I figure the first would be better, but I’m not sure. What do you think? Is there another way? I don’t think netjack is even built into Ubuntu, so that might be especially hard. If I go the ssh -X way, how should I configure JACK for optimal performance? I installed the -rt kernel but it actually seems to be worse; I’m still trying to figure out how to even get that working without xruns (in several years of trying to run Ardour, I have never solved the xrun problem). I don’t know what all these settings in JACK are for… For instance, “Unlock memory for graphics toolkits” seems pretty relevant to option #1, but the cryptic tooltip doesn’t explain what it does. Would unlocking toolkit memory be good or bad?
There’s also the matter of which machine to store the sessions on. I can store them on the laptop, for instance, and use sshfs to open them on the desktop, which would then send the GUI to the laptop over X, which would then play audio on the desktop…