Hi from me. I’m newish to Ubuntu and my first Music production experiences have been “It doesn’t work!” However I found Ardour by accident. I’ve been saying for months that if I could find a Linux sequencer that worked, I would pay. I liked to look of this so I put my money where my mouth is and donated. I’m in. I understand that the manual is incomplete so I’d like to help out with that. The first bit that I can’t find is how to install it so once I get that figured out, I’ll write the dummies guide.
…and, yes the V2.5 that came with Ubuntu Studio is busted!
Question 1/ Do I need a Real time kernel? (my current RT stopped booting. I was concidering a complete rebuild with Jaunty.)
There are several sequencers for Ubuntu (Linux in general). Ardour 2.X is not one of them, it is presently mostly a DAW.
A real time kernel is helpful for recording and especially overdubbing but is not strictly required. If for example you are recording a live concert and not using ardour to send monitoring information back to any speakers, you can get by by setting your buffer sizes to as large as possible. I recently recorded a live concert of 12 tracks at 96khz with a stock kernel using 4096 buffer sizes without a glitch.
It helps to have a properly built jack or jack2 (with SSE support) and ardour (latest from the .deb site) more.
The latest kernel (2.6.29) and rt patch works quite well, however. I am presently running with 128 samples/period without xruns for a string of overdubs.