Kubuntu - Edgy Eft + a lot of hand compiled software…
The current installation has been through three complete hardware changes and still chugs along just fine. I must admit that I have killed Arts in a very horrible way though (may it rest in piece)…
Will update to feisty sometime soon… Interested in Ubuntu Studio - but I am a KDE power user.
gentoo, rt-sources and rtirq
64 bit OpenSuSE 10.2 with the Jacklab-Kernel 2.6.19-rt
Works fine with my laptop & usb soundcard.
Ubuntu breezy
with https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudioPreparation
“dirty” install (scons) of ardour2beta12
works fine
Ok, in the end I choose 64Studio, I’m stick with Debian.
But, since I’m recording on a P4 2,4 Ghz, 512 MB RAM, I decided to do a bit of “cleanup” to make everything smoother. I’ll write it down here, maybe someone can find this helpful.
Gnome kills memory, and 64studio custom theme kills even more. I’ve uninstalled Gnome and 64studio-themes metapackage and installed XFCE. Things run really faster now, and since XFCE is based on GTK too, my beloved Ardour runs as good as ever. I’ve also changed gdm, xdm is pretty good and has everything needed. A good choice is also avoiding startup loading of some daemons (such as cups) that we don’t really need. The clearest way to do so is using BUM (BootUp Manager), that shows you everything that is loaded at startup, and you just have to uncheck what you don’t want to be loaded (bum needs gnome libraries, as far as I know, as it uninstalled when I cleared up gnome).
Anyway, on startup “free” tells me that used memory is about 110M, so I have 400M to give to Ardour and jack. Not so much, but by doing everything I’ve stated before, I’ve earned about 50-60M of memory.
and one Gentoo, one !
Simply Debian … (Sid, with a custom RT kernel)
gentoo + pro-audio overlay and rt-sources.
it’s really cool if you wan’t to be running latest versions or svn/cvs builds.
FC5 – PlanetCCRMA…
I’m no expert; I started using Ardour with the Debian-based DeMuDi distro (very nice, but kaput.) I’ve been using the FC5/PlanetCCRMA setup since last summer, with few modifications.
I am intrigued with all the Gentoo responses. I see that it has great community, docs, and customization. But after all you can customize kernels and build from source on other distros. Are there any audio-specific reasons for the selection?
Debian stable (upgrading to testing soon) with ardour_vst compiled from SVN trunk.
Ubuntu Feisty with svn ardour2, works well. Lowlatency things also (there is a lowlatency version of the stock kernel in the repositories).
64studio -kde- [w/scons build 2.0beta12]
Mandriva 2007 fall edition. Haven’t installed the spring edition yet. Multimedia kernel from Mandriva, Jack , Ardour, etc. No problems like many ubuntu users report. Good Stuff !
Hey everyone… im using GoblinX, its a slackware based distro… http://www.goblinx.com.br/en/… thats the link if youve never seen it…peace.
I’m surprised no one answered “dynebolic”. I’ve run Ardour on Fedora, Ubuntu, and some of the other live distros like ArtistX and Musix. This dynebolic disk is really cool. The easy docking and booting from harddrive is very nice.
The only problem I have with it is that it has a limited amount of the pre-made application modules for the wide variety of non-studio apps that I need, but for media creation it’s very good. So, I dual boot my favorite Linux distro with the option of firing up my fire-breathing, harddisk-based dynebolic.
Now, if it could only get upgraded to the new version of Ardour I’d be set!
-Andy
I’ve tried Dyne:bolic too, but it didn’t work well with my hardware…
Ubuntu Studio. It’s really nice!
FWIW, I use Ubuntu Gutsy and my own rt kernel (2.6.23-rc2). Honestly, I don’t think the distro matters that much. I started to install UbuntuStudio but I knew I would mess around like I do with my other debian boxes (I am a debian user by experience). There’s not much left of UbuntuStudio in my OS, upgraded to gutsy for the most part.
I am running tons of stuff in the background, do daily office work with my DAW 
and still, I get no xruns whatsoever. The onboard sound chip is even sharing the IRQ of my RME Hammerfall HDSP (I recently got the Multiface II, very nice piece of hardware!). I have all common apps (amarok, mplayer, etc, outputting to hw:0 which is the onboard sound chip, while jackd and related apps use hw:1, namely snd-hdsp). This is very nice.
I use two HDs, one for the OS and one for data. The OS is ext3-formatted, while the data uses XFS. IS NICE! 
There’s only one thing that annoys me : I cannot properly resume sound from S3 (acpi sleep). But I can live with that for now.
This thread is old but anyway…
I’m on Debian Sid with custom RT kernel (apparently I’m not alone). Just registered, and I’m happy to be here 
Also testing ardour 2.1pre, woho! it’s pretty nice
64Studio running i386 (and on a AMD64 processor, feel free to laff).
64Studio is really very easy to set up, I have not felt the need to customise anything except installing flash player, seq24. I’m using the Ardour version that came with it (2.?).
Also 64Studio is debian so I feel I should put in a vote for that too …
Also I’m using crappo SiS onboard sound and it’s performing pretty damn well. Latency is not very noticeable, like I have recorded guitar/vocal tracks with software monitoring and the sync was fine. (sorry I can’t actually quote the latency figure)