Arch Linux

sam the wizer

Member

Registered: 2008-10-21

Posts: 7

Arch Linux/Hydrogen Drum Machine

reposted from http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57574

I found an open circuit a while back for a midi drum interface.  Since I found it I've thought about making a dedicated drum machine from a simple Linux box running Hydrogen.  I've been looking for a good base distro to use for this project, something light and fast and easy to manipulate.  I had resigned to the Linux From Scratch approach when I found Arch.  I think this will work well, but there are a few concerns I have:

1. Boot time.  This is mostly due to the Bootloader, which I should be able to remove since I likely won't be doing any upgrades once I get it stable.

2. Environment.  I wanted to cut out the DE/WM since these will tax the resources of a minimalist system.  Should I just run Hydrogen from X or can I run it from a CLI?

3. Run from RAM? I was planning on building this as a small motherboard with a cheap single core processor and a cheap flash drive (possibly just USB) and was wondering if it was possible to tweak arch to run from RAM (similar to Puppy linux). 

Thanks for any suggestions,
Sam

evilgold

Member

Registered: 2008-10-30

Posts: 120

Re: Arch Linux/Hydrogen Drum Machine

reposted from http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57574

I found an open circuit a while back for a midi drum interface.  Since I found it I've thought about making a dedicated drum machine from a simple Linux box running Hydrogen.  I've been looking for a good base distro to use for this project, something light and fast and easy to manipulate.  I had resigned to the Linux From Scratch approach when I found Arch.  I think this will work well, but there are a few concerns I have:

1. Boot time.  This is mostly due to the Bootloader, which I should be able to remove since I likely won't be doing any upgrades once I get it stable.

Arch boots pretty fast for me, it takes about 30seconds from grub to gdm on my pentium M 1.7ghz.

2. Environment.  I wanted to cut out the DE/WM since these will tax the resources of a minimalist system.  Should I just run Hydrogen from X or can I run it from a CLI?

You could probably have twm run a basic xsession and have hydrogen launch from there. Most lightweight DMs only take about a second to load, you you could probably use icewm or openbox without much penalty.

3. Run from RAM? I was planning on building this as a small motherboard with a cheap single core processor and a cheap flash drive (possibly just USB) and was wondering if it was possible to tweak arch to run from RAM (similar to Puppy linux).

This is defienetly possible, since there are liveCD and usb images for arch already, It might require a bit of looking into, but its doable.

sam the wizer

Member

Registered: 2008-10-21

Posts: 7

Re: Arch Linux/Hydrogen Drum Machine

I found a couple of guides for making a bootable image, one on the Arch wiki and one at pendrivelinux.com.  I'm going to start building my image on a free partition pretty soon and work on tweaking it to speed up boot time, etc.  I'll keep my progress posted (and likely be seeking more suggestions).  Once I get it pretty well maximized I'll try to find some where to make the ISO available in case anyone else wants to play with it.