Testing 3.0 - A Sneak Peek at 64 Studio 3.0 and Ardour3

"I'm testing 64 Studio 3.0 beta2 on my HP G60 notebook. The machine's CPU is an AMD Turion X2 clocking at ~2 GHz; the internal hard disk is a 250G SATA drive; graphics are handled by an nVidia GeForce 8200M; sound is managed by the ubiquitous Intel HDA audio chipset/codec.

"64 Studio is designed for 64-bit processors, but a legacy version is available for i386 CPUs. I have been unsuccessful in attempts to install some other 64-bit distributions on this machine, so I tried the i386 version first. I aborted the installation when the installer told me that no installable CPU could be found for my system. Later I discovered the workaround for this message, but I opted to try the 64-bit installation. To my happy surprise, the system installed without a problem. I rebooted the box and soon saw the familiar login screen for 64 Studio. Unfortunately, it was displayed at a 640x480 video resolution, courtesy of the default VESA graphics driver. Apparently, the kernel nv driver doesn't like the 8200M, so I was either stuck with VESA or I could install the nVidia binary driver.

"I used the excellent Synaptic utility to install the 2.6.29 source package, then I copied the existing kernel configuration (in /boot) to the source directory at /usr/src/2.6.29. The nVidia installer needs to find a configured source tree, so I ran sudo make oldconfig and then installed the nVidia driver. I removed /etc/X11/xorg.conf, ran nvidia-xconfig to make a new video configuration, rebooted, and soon saw the familiar nVidia splash screen, followed by the 64 Studio login. Figure 1 shows off the new rez and 64 Studio's new look."

Complete Story

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