Hey all,

New processors are crazy fast, and ram is cheap. Anyone can get a system with a dual core 64bit processor and 4GB of ram for under $1,000. The question I pose to all of you is, why is 64bit development for linux lagging so far behind? I can't even get Ubuntu Studio for a 64bit box.

Has anyone here had success compiling Pd (and/or) the extended packages for a 64bit Linux environment? If so, I'd like to compile everyone's feedback and post a procedure for others to follow. My intention is to support Pd x86_64 builds. Thanks!

64Studio by Dan James team. They've been working on 64bit since a long while back anticipating just the situation you describe (cheap multi core 64 bit) and recompiling most 32bit linux audio apps to work. Give it a try. There is some chatter on pd-list about 64bit and afaik people are compiling version > 0.40 without too much grief.

Ah ha! That is most great. I'll load it up in VMware and give it a shot. Obi I'm curious, what is your distro of choice right now? There are so many to choose from right now!

Once Gutsy Gibbon come out (sometime in early October) Ubuntu Studio will be available in 64bit. As of Gutsy Gibbon, all of the packages contained in Ubuntu Studio will be in the official Ubuntu repo, meaning all architectures supported!

At the moment Ubuntu Studio has its own repo for a few programs (ardour, wired) that didnt quite make the official repo in time for Fiesty

be sure to check out the ubuntu studio tutorial blog @ http://www.ubustu.com

"Obi I'm curious, what is your distro of choice right now? There are so many to choose from right now!"

Debian, the mother of all distros . My current Deb will be 3 years old in November, just been upgraded with apt-get and had one kernel change. For live or travel I use PureDyne or a Knoppix.

I got hooked on the philosophy of lots of small ultra low power fanless boxes doing different tasks rather than one uber workstation - love little itx machines and supporting smaller hardware manufacturers. For example I had one just configured as an FX box with spdif IO and FreqTweak, Jack Rack etc. That might change soon as really powerful 64 bit athlons are getting so cheap. I want to go back to doing sound design work full time and will probably need a better integrated system rather than my current experimental collection of toys.

Ubuntu is what I suggest for most folks, and what I install on mates computers if they ask to make the switch - pppst It's Debian with a different name

Those mini-itx boards are sexy. One in particular caught my eye on newegg, it was an intel 945g board w/ core 2 duo mobile support and built in video w/ dvi. I've seen a few other really nice looking AM2 boards as well. The VIA mini-itx all-in-one boards are particularly interesting to me, they're cheap enough allow anyone to build an army of willing, Linux based robots :-D. I'd be interested to know how you manage your .pd files across those boxes, whether you put the code in cvs/svn and have them pull from the repo or if you have each one w/ their own code base and function.

This sounds sweet obi, I just checked out newegg and mini-itx is very tempting. I am now fantasizing about a system booted off of an extremely minimal flash based operating system, loading patches off of a network. What do you need to get these boards going? Is it just A HD, keyboard, power supply and your good to go?

These look cute - http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5551137361.html

@bz - they are pretty disparate, each has it's own life and from time to time I FTP stuff over to the server and sort it out when I get time - or write it into a tutorial and put it on my site.

btw I forgot Puppy Linux - xfce desktp is sweet. Running without X in -nogui mode is a blast when you want a dedicated standalone.

@nestor - they are very easy to set up. Basically what you say, connect a PSU, keyboard and mouse and you're running. Sometimes a slow boot from USB or Flash. PureDyne is lovely though, with everything running out of RAM (> 1G needed) its amazingly fast. Plus it comes with Ardour and a few other toys ready configured. Btw, I don't reccommend mini-itx.com, they took my money and sent me a broken board then never replaced it.

Okay obi, it's almost winter and I'm in new england, once the basement dries out I'm gonna need some projects. I'm already damn sure gonna buy an arduino, but I'd love to have a portable DSP box to just live in a rack and run linux/pd! What do you suggest for a starter model? I have an old edirol usb interface that should work, so it doesn't really need a good soundset... a decent amount or ram would be nice, but cheap is better.

How do you reconcile delay and sync issues between the machines?

This is a bit old now, a 19" 1U mini system I built for a company in 2005. As you see there's loadsa room in a standard server rack for adding extra DSP/MIDI boards to make custom studio gear. I did another one more recently for some guys who wanted a gigable digital crossover, I found a supplier of *plastic* 19" racks that are cheaper, lighter and easier to work with than steel or aluminium. Gotta watch the heat dissipation in a plastic housing though!

http://spectrasoft.co.uk/~andyf/buildserver/serverbuild.html