Got myself a new (not really) laptop today and installed AVLinux, following suggestions from this site. Bought it in the morning, installed at noon, and sitting at it now in the evening. Soon as I get all the connecting done, I hope to be using Ardour 3.5 … will probably have a question (or two) along the way! Not trying to bore anyone with this senseless posting but I got the idea from you guys so I just thought I’d mention, you succeeded 
2GB memory is plenty for Ardour, isn't it?
Only just enough… 
The previous test / development system I was using for A3 had around (only…! ) 2GB and struggled to get A3 started, without much disk / swap thrashing (and gnashing of teeth etc) - no idea what was taking such huge resources, and admittedly this was more an issue with A3 64Bit, but, being of an age to have experienced software development on 8Bit systems - mainly assembly language (the original open source, where, the binary was the source…), but with memory measured in KB there’s still part of me which finds the idea of GB let alone multiple GB of memory, and the idea that any application could use anything like that amount of memory slightly incomprehensible…
A limit of 2GB per process isn’t quite the same as a total system RAM of 2GB though, is it? I don’t quite know what is allowed to run in separate PAE segments (jack? plugins?), but at least Ardour could have its own 2GB space and the kernel and drivers could be occupying separate memory segments.
Oh, I remember 8 bit programming too, and for a day job I’m still working in embedded systems with 512k of flash memory and 1MB of RAM
I just find that the 32-bit versions of linux dont run quite as fast as the 64-bit , Ive also read about access above above 4gb of ram can be slower when running 32-bit rather than 64 bit.
I do admit though that i found 32-bit to be a bit more stable than 64-bit.
anyway.
I too have often wondered where all this memory is going? Firefox sometimes taking upto 300-400mb when playing fash movies. etc
last time i checked memory consumption in ardour it took my total sytem load to around 1.2gb i havnt checked recently. Im running with 4gb of ram (256mb is shared for onboard graphics) with an athlon dual core 64 bit @ 2ghz. Runs pretty well until you get to about 8 tracks with lots of plugins. Especially when using Pitch shifter.
My audio-laptop only has 2gig of ram and I never ran into trouble concerning memory… But I’m using the 64-bit version…
I suppose it can depend on what distro you are using and how much “crap” you have installed. I have an old shuttle PC which i installed a stripped down ubuntu on it for using with XBMC . After login it was only consuming about 100mb of ram compared with my kx studio install on my main machine which uses about 400mb once logged in (running lxde instead of kde i think it jumpted to 600mb )
now i have firefox loaded and that alone is using about 400mb of ram
I’m using 64-Bit-Fedora 17 with Planet CCRMA and IceWM for audio-stuff.
Thanks for the welcome … it’s a bit af a new world. like living in other people’s flat … opening all the cupboards to see what’s in them and all. I managed to upgrade from 6.0.1 to 6.0.3 today and I found I actually like doing things in the terminal! Quite proud of myself already I haven’t been able to do any music yet because it proved impossible to find a PCMCIA card for FireWire in town. Bought one on ebay at once but it takes a few days … meanwhile, studying the AVLinux manual and getting around.
Oh and I’ve got 4GB of RAM on this seven year old lenovo T61 and two processors running at 2.5 GHz.
that shoud be more than enough to cope with ardour. Im running an athon 64 dua core 2ghz. it copes fine with sma projects. once the track count gets upto about 8 though with ots of pugins and things start to struggle.
Hi,
FWIW I do all my recording stuff with AVL on a Dell Inspiron laptop with 2.0Gb or RAM and early 32bit 2.0Ghz Core Duo, so far this hasn’t been a hardship other than some of the Synthesizer plugins I occasionally use (ie Loomer String and Aspect) are a bit CPU hungry and have to be converted to audio tracks for final mixes, Most of my arrangements are 10-18 tracks with a variety of plugins, as a side note the plugins you use can make a humungous difference, for example the linuxDSP plugins are very highly optimized and use very little CPU even when running multiple instances whereas some of the Open Source plugins in early development are not nearly as tightly coded. I also run (and provide) optimized builds of Ardour which may or may not be a good idea at this point in time but probaly weigh in a little less in RAM consumption.
Anyway the point is you don’t necessarily need a 64bit supercomputer to run Ardour, however many choices can be made in order to get more out of whatever system you may have…
have a look over at the kx studio forums. KX studio is looking liking its ready for debian. There are lots of really usefull packages from KX studio like carla and a bunch of plugins. Cadence is also really handy for managing jack and it also has links in it to open upon vairous session managers and patchbays as well as managing plugin directorys.
i think i may be going back to av - linux only thing that has been stopping me is its not availible in 64-bit
With a pae kernel (which is now the default in AV Linux 6.0.3) so you can install more than 2GB of RAM and use it, how much does it really matter to be using a 32 bit system? 2GB memory is plenty for Ardour, isn’t it?
Hi,
ClausRogge,
Welcome to the world of Linux Audio! If you haven’t already please join up at the AV Linux forum although I browse here regularly the best place for AV Linux help is at it’s forum community, I think you will find Ardour an amazing feature-filled DAW, it is in very heavy active development right now and there are a few minor flies in the ointment but you will soon see how accommodating, friendly and helpful Paul and the development team are.
Unless you are using sample libraries greater than 4Gb in size (ie with linuxsampler) 32bit is really a NON-issue, I’m sure that will change in a few years time as 32bit hardware disappears and developers back-burner 32bit testing, but in the reality of now for Audio work with Ardour 64bit will not provide more tracks, better quality sound or anything else audibly meaningful at the end of the day. 64bit is great and it is now the standard of course, but for a DAW what should matter more is the stability and quality of the OS not the CPU architecture…