Ubuntu Studio 9.10

Shortly after I burned my first ISO of PCLinuxOS, I configured my first serious desktop with a dual boot of Ubuntu Studio 8.04 and XP. As I recall I had many growing pains configuring my audio with UbuStu, however, at some point I was successful and was able to recompose a song I wrote in high-school using Rosegarden.

At some point, I decided to upgrade to UbuStu-9.04 as I had been enjoying the usability of Ubuntu-9.04 (Jaunty) and 9.10 (Karmic) at school. Sadly, I had some major issues with this install that forced me to move to Ubuntu-9.10. I knew I would probably try UbuStu-9.10 when it was released with the hope that the earlier incompatibility would be corrected. It seemed to work okay, however I could not get it to work with my Ralink Wirless card. Also, I was frustrated that the UbuStu developers didn't include some of the slick upgrades (namely the Ubuntu Software Center) that is steadily improving the usability of Ubuntu. I had no way of accessing the web without "ruining my life" so I moved on to 9.10 and decided to go on a significant "shopping spree." I installed loads of science, education and music apps from the Software Center, as well as the kernel-rt from synaptic.

The most significant challenge was getting the JACK audio server to run and I eventually found that I had to add my user to the "audio" and "pulse" groups under System -> Administration -> Users and Groups. The follwing URLs were helpful for me:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=600626
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1336078
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=453486

and most significantly:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1143784

I still get the following error from Rosegarden however:

System timer resolution is too low
Rosegarden was unable to find a high-resolution timing source for MIDI performance.
You may be able to solve this problem by loading the RTC timer kernel module. To do this, try running sudo modprobe snd-rtctimer in a terminal window and then restarting Rosegarden.
Alternatively, check whether your Linux distributor provides a multimedia-optimized kernel. See http://rosegarden.wiki.sourceforge.net/Low+latency+kernels for notes about this.