Will Ardour run on a Chromebook?

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

I’m considering moving on to different recording hardware (currently running an XLR mic into a Zoom).

Separately, I’ve also been thinking of getting a Rockchip Chromebook and installing Libreboot / Linux on it.

Since the Chromebook would be silent, I’m wondering if I could run an external audio interface into it and run Ardour on it.

Possible?

#2

Probably possible. In fact I am sure I have heard of others doing it. Technically I am running it on a Chromebook, but being that it is the second gen pixel, probably not quite useful info for you:)

              Seablade
#3

The Rockchip is an ARM processor, so the binaries provided on this website will not install properly on that Chromebook. However, it may be possible to build Ardour from source for that architecture. If it was me, I’d save myself the hassle and get a Chromebook with an Intel processor.

#4

I would tend to agree with the Intel chip requirement, some parts of Ardour utilize SSE to improve performance IIRC, not sure you will get compatibility with that on ARM, but not sure.

        Seablade
#5

Modern ARM CPUs do have a a hard-floating point unit and a SSE equivalent called NEON. But Ardour does not have dedicated asm code for this, so it’s up to the compiler on non x86 platforms. In any case Ardour doesn’t do much DSP by itself, it concerns summing and level-metering mostly. It’s usually only plugins that require SIMD for heavy processing.

Anyway, if you only record (HDR) and don’t mix, not much DSP power is needed and ARM CPUs will be fine. Ardour does run just fine on a Raspberry Pi for example, but I would not recommend that for any serious studio work. YMMV.

1 Like
#6

I have run Ardour on an Intel Chromebook under Crouton before.

Cheers,

Keith

#7

I bought used $98 RockChip Chromebook , and install Xubuntu16.04 with Xfce4 .
And I try apt-get install ardour , then it was OK to download .
but ver was 4.6.0 and it didnt work with Jack & Cras… (jackd with silent option , ardour will run but no sound)

Then I try to build newer version . To gather libs for build , I used apt-get again
apt-get build-dep ardour
then aquire latest source tree from github.
Next started to try build
./waf configure
then It was stopped with error “missing libarchive” , then try to get it again
apt-get install libarchive-dev

after that , ./waf configure complete with some warning but it said “finish”
then next simply type ./waf
after 1 hour and more. The build was complete for this 32bit ARM chip cute notebook !

And launch ./ardev , It can play wav without any annoying Jack setting !
I will try to test with this state more , after that I will install using ./waf install .

Not so many trouble , only missing libarchive-dev.

#8

If you upgrade it to 18.04, then you would be able to download Ardour 5.12

#9

Hi , nice info !
But My chromebook is C100PA and 18.04 was stopped installing with crouton …

I have no work around about this .
So I compromised to using 16.04 .