planetCCRMA port

I want to see planetCCRMA (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma) work 
on SPARC hardware.  Aurora LINUX appears to be the only distro that is 
based on RedHat.  I wonder what I need to do to make this happen, so I'm 
in the very preliminary stages.  An email to aurora-sparc-devel seemed 
to be the best place to start.

Likely many people don't know what planetCCRMA is, and most people don't 
really need it, but for those of us who do, it would be nice to have it 
work on SPARC.  It is a collection of audio packages precompiled to be 
easily installed as rpms using the apt  tools.  It essentially 
transforms your LINUX box into a digital audio workstation.  Their 
kernel has the low latency patches compiled in, and allows for 
"realtime" scheduling with jackd.  Latency can be kept low enough to be 
practical for multitrack recording with ardour (ardour.org), and other 
high quality opensource audio applications.

My guinea pig will be an Ultra 2 with 2x200MHz procs.  I see that it has 
a CS4231 sound chip and that it supports full duplex at 16 bit up to 
48000hz.  I know alsa supports this ( http://tinyurl.com/6lpfy).  I hope 
having an SBUS machine won't be a complication.

I only see one mention in the archives of alsa ( 
http://lists.auroralinux.org/mailman/htdig/aurora-sparc-devel/2004-June/000219.html).  
I don't see mention of jackd.

I also don't see anything in the ultrasparc list at kernel.org.  I have 
not yet looked at the lists of other distros.

I need your guidence on whether I should go with aurora 1 or with the 
1.91 to start with.  Ultimately, I may need to go with CVS anyway, when 
I run into complications.  I am leaning toward 1.91 since it is newer.  
FC1 is used with alsa more than 7.3 is so there would be more interest 
in the planetCCRMA project there. (they don't seem to interested yet, 
though Fernando the project lead did ask me why I wanted to do this.  I 
will answer him when I have more to say, but really I'm  just doing it 
for the hell of it.)

I am leaning toward 1.91.  From your experience, what reasons would I 
*not* want to go with 1.91?  Is it relatively stable?  is it usable 
yet?  Does it matter?  why?  etc.


Generally I guess this would make sense for me to start with:

- install aurora
- install apt, add appropriate rpm sources for sparc if anyone maintains 
such a thing.  If not leave the binaries alone, and just add the rpm-src 
from planetCCRMA and get all the source
- set to work on getting their kernel and alsa to compile and run.  (I 
hope the patches work on SPARC)
- compile jackd
- if all that works I'll be happy.  From there, I guess I would want 
ardour next.  beyond that  I would hope to generate enough interest that 
the people who want the other 100+ packages would chip in.
- generate rpms when I see that much actually working and make them 
available both to the aurora linux community of course, and also through 
an apt repository to stay consistant with CCRMA.



Thanks,

Justin

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