Gentoo Studio: A Gentoo Linux Professional Audio Workstation

[Oblivius]

Has anybody here gotten Gentoo Studio to work 100% with the integrated GPU on an AMD Ryzen 2400G Raven Ridge CPU on a Gigabyte AB350M-Gaming 3 motherboard?

I'm getting a blank screen after I log in with a user account I've created.

It does appear that the kernel is up and running though. I can "ping" it, without any packet loss, from another Linux PC coexisting on the same network behind an Asus NAT broadband router. A "ssh" connection will be refused though so I can't do anything remotely. I'll end up needing to do either a hard power-off or reset using the corresponding button on my PC case.

The only way I can do anything is to boot the Gentoo Live DVD (albeit on a USB stick) and do the convoluted steps necessary to mount all of the partitions I've created and chroot in.

This definitely appears to be a problem with the integrated gpu.

The two things I would like to do is to enable "ssh" remote logins and to get X properly working with the Ryzen 2400G GPU.

I appreciate any help but realize that I may need to provide more information.

Many thanks in advance.

[audiodef]

I've noticed a similar issue on a fresh install of mine, different hardware. I had to chroot in, rm xdm from runlevel, set VIDEO_CARDS in make.conf just for the integrated graphics, update world, and then it worked with startx. Still having an issue with Lightdm, and I don't know why yet.

Try what I just described and let me know if it works. Maybe that will help me figure out what's going on in the tarball build.

[Oblivius]

OK. I haven't solved the underlying problem but I can now log in with "ssh" by adding this line to "/etc/hosts.allowed":

sshd: 192.168.1. EXCEPT 192.168.1.1

where 192.168.1.* are the ip addresses on my LAN sitting behind my broadband router and its firewall and "EXCEPT 192.168.1.1" is to block any access from the router itself just on the possible chance that someone or something might break in from outside.

This part isn't perfect but it's good enough that I can at least now copy and paste a screen-full of command-line information to show here. I now can also be able to shut the system properly with the "shutdown" command.

[audiodef]

Good! Let me know how it goes.

I find ssh very useful for transferring files and projects between my DAW computers.

[Oblivius]

OK, here's where I'm at now that I'm no longer flying blind:

When my setup appeared to hang, I discovered that I can get to a command-line login prompt by using <ctrl>-<alt>-<f4>.
(Actually, I now see that I could have used any of the function key from <f1> to <f6> rather than only <f4> exclusively)

This is what I get when I try to use "startx":

xauth: file /home/useraccount/.serverauth.3694 does not exist

X.Org X Server 1.19.5
Release Date: 2017-10-12
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux 4.5.2-aufs-r1 x86_64 Gentoo
Current Operating System: Linux livecd 4.16.18-rt-rt9 #2 SMP PREEMPT RT Wed Jul 11 01:26:22 EDT 2018 x86_64
Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-4.16.18-rt-rt9 root=/dev/nvme0n1p3 ro
Build Date: 05 July 2018 06:18:03PM

Current version of pixman: 0.34.0
Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
to make sure that you have the latest version.
Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
(++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Wed Jul 11 02:18:19 2018
(==) Using config directory: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d"
(==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d"
(II) [KMS] Kernel modesetting enabled.
gbm: failed to open any driver (search paths /usr/lib64/dri)
gbm: Last dlopen error: /usr/lib64/dri/radeonsi_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
failed to load driver: radeonsi
gbm: failed to open any driver (search paths /usr/lib64/dri)
gbm: Last dlopen error: /usr/lib64/dri/radeonsi_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
failed to load driver: radeonsi
EGL_MESA_drm_image required.
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 58: twm: command not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 59: xclock: command not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 60: xterm: command not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 62: exec: xterm: not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 61: xterm: command not found
xinit: connection to X server lost

waiting for X server to shut down (II) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.

The only reason I specified radeonsi in "/etc/portage/make.conf" ('VIDEO_CARDS="amdgpu radeonsi"') is because that is what was instructed in https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU.

I'll try taking that out next to see what happens.

[audiodef]

When you install Gentoo Studio, don't do anything specific until/unless you have trouble with the default install. Did the default install work? Did you make that change to make.conf before booting into Gentoo Studio for the first time?

[Oblivius]

I've been making steady progress, up to about 85% done, and can now post this message while using my Ryzen 5 2400g pc.

I still can't log straight into X or XFCE4 (in whatever is the intended default method for Gentoo Studio) because of an unresolved problem with, I'm guessing, the display manager.

(I'm unfamiliar with this aspect of Linux although the kernel now appears to be running fine underneath.)

If I go through the motion of logging in and letting xfce4 crash, by using <ctrl>-<alt>-<f1> to log in through a command-line interface prompt, I can now start xfce4 by using the CLI command "startxfce4" but NOT "startx".

To shut down everything, I need to log out of xfce4 to get back to the CLI, log out of the user account that I've created and log in as root for the final step of using "shutdown -h now".

I've created a pastebin account and can give a copy of all of the relevant configuration files:

make.conf: https://pastebin.com/rbC5Hgu8

Kernel .config: https://pastebin.com/m7MjdiQT

Xorg.0.log: https://pastebin.com/QpXjjAVt

world: https://pastebin.com/M1pNAjEL

The other problems that I've yet to tackle is the lack of sound and the inability to access files on the network on the LAN side of my broadband router.

I don't recall which command that I had used but it appears that the sound hardware is being seen as well as that for the HDMI connection to my 4K television.

(Only getting 3840x2160 resolution at 25Hz refresh rate with the integrated video of the Ryzen 5 2400G though. That appears to be because the AMD B350 chipset only allows an HDMI 1.4 connection although I could be mistaken.)

[Oblivius]

Still trying to get Gentoo Studio to start up 100%.

I'm not sure what of the following may be helping at all or may be a wasted effort:

I manually created the file "/etc/env.d/90xsession" within which I have 'XSESSION="Xfce4"', emerged "x11-misc/lightdm-gtk-greeter" and then, later on, emerged "x11-libs/cairo" and am now seeing the following:

From dmesg:

Code: Select all

[   10.859097] lightdm-gtk-gre[3481]: segfault at 10 ip 00007f4d33021640 sp 00007ffd608f0f38 error 4 in libcairo.so.2.11400.12[7f4d32fb8000+109000]
[   11.099052] X (3308) used greatest stack depth: 11104 bytes left

From Xorg.0.log:

Code: Select all

[    10.919] (II) event1  - Power Button: device removed
[    10.934] (II) event0  - Power Button: device removed
[    10.953] (II) event13 - Lenovo Optical Mouse: device removed
[    10.985] (II) event14 -   USB Keyboard: device removed
[    11.017] (II) event15 -   USB Keyboard: device removed
[    11.049] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[    11.049] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[    11.049] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[    11.049] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[    11.049] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[    11.097] (II) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.

I'm guessing those numbers on the left are time stamps.

It does appear that the above may show why I'm unable to boot straight into xfce with lightdm. However, I am able to now salvage the situation by, once again, using <ctrl>-<alt>-<f1> to log in via command-line interface and using "startx" to get into xfce.

After that, everything, other than lack of sound or Samba LAN file access to be dealt with, now appears to be working fine. I can now both shut down and reboot the system without having to take the extra steps of logging out of a user account and logging in as root.

Anybody here knows what's happening above?

[audiodef]

Oblivius,

Nah, it's not a wasted effort. If we figure out what's going on, I will use it to improve the install method, if I can.

I'd really like to know whether you're using the install script or doing a manual install.

[audiodef]

June 2018 Changelog:

https://gentoostudio.org/?p=488

[audiodef]

Gentoo Studio is officially out of beta. Just because it's time.

https://gentoostudio.org/?p=490

[johngalt]

Congrats! I can see you've put an extensive amount of tie and work into it.

[audiodef]

Thanks. Yes, over the years I've put a chunk of time into making it what it is now.

Working on updating the installer in Python instead of bash now.

[audiodef]

August 2018 changelog: https://gentoostudio.org/?p=494

[FawkesThat]

First post here, and I'm new to Gentoo. However, not new to using Linux. I've been making use of Debian-based installs for quite a few years now.

Whilst I know my way around Debian's apt, Portage is significantly different. And, I don't want to have to start from scratch too quickly. I've read several of the wiki pages on the various aspects of it, and experience tells me I'll probably end up going completely the wrong way about achieving a few of the things I need/want to do.

I've installed on an external drive for now, both my laptop and the studio machine are i5 processors which allows me to work on this at home. In either case, I'm usually on a mobile 3G/4G connection. I found myself adding --timeout=30 to wget commands in the various install scripts because it's not that reliable a connection.

Firstly, not having a graphical browser came as a surprise. I see there's an ebuild for Firefox included in /usr/portage/www-client/firefox. What's the proper "Gentoo way" to enable, or build, this and not have subsequent updates to Gentoo Studio miss it? I've done stuff like this often enough to know what looks right at first read through frequently isn't. Especially not when I'd want to be able to rebundle my system modifications for future, non-manual, application.

Some of those aren't quite as straightforward. My studio machine has a pair of Edirol DA2496 cards and rack mount breakout boxes. They're ICE1712 chipset based and happily manage 96kHz at 24 bits.

Now, the mixer Gentoo Studio includes for these is the Envy24 control. I recall reading several years ago about a few problems with this performance-wise. Apparently the "pretty LED" effect it gives involves drawing lots and lots of rectangles. KXStudio also includes Mudita24 (and the two may be interdependent) which wastes an awful lot less cycles on prettification of the level meters. I'll not be in the slightest offended if someone wants to politely remind me where I should have submitted that particular request. But, curious how I'd go about it myself.

That out the way, I'm going to need to make some code modifications to the ICE1712 driver. I would guess whoever added in DA2496 support only had access to a single card, and didn't have access to a wordclock source. The rack mount breakout boxes for the Edirol have a switch to select an external (BNC or ADAT) wordclock or internal source. They can also be chained together via BNC connected wordclock cables - there's an internal jumper you can use, but it doesn't support rates of 88kHz or higher.

I've only one or two source files needing tweaked. The required functionality is already built-in to the aforementioned mixers for ICE1712 cards. It's simply not accessible unless the card's full capabilities are known when it's detected.

That's much more of a "What's the proper Gentoo (in general) way to go about this?" question. I know it's got to be more than just copying the ice1712 directory over to /usr/local/src/... And, I'll cross the bridge of submitting patches to ALSA when I've had this operating stably for a while.

Once I've wrapped my head around that little lot, I can start properly looking at making use of the big multitouch monitor I've got. Anyone done anything with the handful of multitouch MIDI/OSC UI builders out there?

[NeddySeagoon]

FawkesThat,

Welcome to Gentoo

Gentoo gives you two things.
1) The packages you have asked for.
2) The packages that are required to support the packages you asked for.

That means that if you haven't installed it yet, you don't have it or didn't need it.

Code: Select all

emerge firefox

will get you firefox but there are lots of knobs to twiddle, so don't do that yet.

Code: Select all

$ eix firefox
[I] www-client/firefox
     Available versions:  [M]52.9.0^d 60.2.2^d 60.3.0^d (~)62.0.3^d{tbz2} (~)63.0^d{tbz2} {bindist clang custom-cflags custom-optimization dbus debug eme-free geckodriver +gmp-autoupdate gtk2 hardened hwaccel jack +jemalloc lto neon pgo pulseaudio rust +screenshot selinux startup-notification system-cairo system-harfbuzz system-icu system-jpeg system-libevent system-libvpx system-sqlite test wifi L10N="ach af an ar as ast az bg bn-BD bn-IN br bs ca cak cs cy da de dsb el en-GB en-ZA eo es-AR es-CL es-ES es-MX et eu fa ff fi fr fy ga gd gl gn gu he hi hr hsb hu hy id is it ja ka kab kk km kn ko lij lt lv mai mk ml mr ms nb nl nn or pa pl pt-BR pt-PT rm ro ru si sk sl son sq sr sv ta te th tr uk uz vi xh zh-CN zh-TW"}

tells that there are four versions of firefox to choose from with lots of USE flags for optional support.
L10N options provide support for various languages.

As firefox is a big package, with a few big dependancies, Gentoo also provides

Code: Select all

www-client/firefox-bin
     Available versions:  [M]52.9.0^ms 60.3.0^ms 63.0^ms {+ffmpeg +pulseaudio selinux startup-notification L10N="ach af an ar as ast az bg bn-BD bn-IN br bs ca cs cy da de el en-GB en-ZA eo es-AR es-CL es-ES es-MX et eu fa fi fr fy ga gd gl gu he hi hr hsb hu hy id is it ja kk km kn ko lt lv mai mk ml mr ms nb nl nn or pa pl pt-BR pt-PT rm ro ru si sk sl son sq sr sv ta te th tr uk uz vi xh zh-CN zh-TW"}

There are not nearly so many options. firefox-bin is Mozillas binary build installed by Gentoo. You save compile time at the expense of reduced choice of options.

Its always good to see what would be installed before you actually do it.
Compare the output of

Code: Select all

emerge -pv firefox

with

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emerge -pv firefox-bin

This shows what would be installed with what USE settings.

The choice is yours.

[FawkesThat]

FawkesThat,

Welcome to Gentoo

Thanks!

That means that if you haven't installed it yet, you don't have it or didn't need it.

Code: Select all

emerge firefox

will get you firefox but there are lots of knobs to twiddle, so don't do that yet.

As I said, the obvious answer is often wrong.

Compare the output of

Code: Select all

emerge -pv firefox

with

Code: Select all

emerge -pv firefox-bin

This shows what would be installed with what USE settings.

The choice is yours.

Thanks for that, it'll be a lot easier digging up stuff with a graphical browser. Having not ended up making the system unmaintainable in the process.

[audiodef]

It seems that the preemption model option in the kernel has been moved. As of 4.19.5, it's under General setup.

[sungreen]

Hello! I installed Gentoo Studio on a virtual machine. When you first start the system can not be registered. After entering the password (or login and password), the login prompt again appears.

[jjvv]

Completely new to Gentoo here, but experienced with various other distros. I'm very interested to try Gentoo Studio for audio production. So far I can say thank you for the informative, well-formatted site at gentoostudio.org. You have clearly put a lot of time into this project :)

I ran into these issues:

1. GentooStudio website SSL certificate expired
2. Stage 4 tarball for 2019-05-18 is corrupt
3. Could not log these on MantisBT - signup Captcha for bugs.gentoostudio.org seems broken

1: this is of course not any major problem.

3: I'm uncertain whether this is just my browsers (PaleMoon, Firefox) or the Captcha servers acting up because of the SSL issue. Or maybe I have Flash issues in this particular case - Flash works fine last time I checked, but I can't rule out a problem on my side yet.

[s]2: Main problem: corrupt stage 4 tarball stage4-amd64-latest.tar.bz2. Corruption seems to occur at the bzip compression level.Result: it untars fine until a point (I can't remember which file). I have tried multiple times to extract it on the target machine, as well as with 7z on Windows. Now toying with bunzip2's options to see if I can get more detail.[/s] UPDATE AT BOTTOM

I have downloaded the file three times in the last 24 hours: twice the main file, and once the .previous version. A cursory md5sum suggests all are indeed identical.

Code: Select all

~/Loot/OS/GentooStudio$ md5sum *.bz2
2bd3b088d18cc8392cc1df51c37d52c7  previous-stage4-amd64-latest.tar.bz2
2bd3b088d18cc8392cc1df51c37d52c7  stage4-amd64-latest.tar.bz2

I will next attempt a normal Gentoo install and then switch the package manager to Gentoo Studio repos and see where that takes me. I have only the vaguest idea how to do so, but guess it can't be too hard.

---
UPDATE: I just attempted decompression of the same file again, this time on my main machine (bzip2 1.0.6 - not that I expect that to be any different). Mysteriously, the errors are gone. I will next... try again, I guess :-s

Uhh... yep, this was definitely a false negative. I have no idea how I repeatedly ran into it, sorry.

I scrutenized it again to be sure...

Code: Select all

~/Loot/OS/GentooStudio$ bzcat -v <previous-stage4-amd64-latest.tar.bz2 >test7.tar
  (stdin): done
/Loot/OS/GentooStudio$ ls -lh test7.tar 
-rw-r--r-- 1 x x 7.6G May 23 23:28 test7.tar
~/Loot/OS/GentooStudio$ file test7.tar 
test7.tar: POSIX tar archive
~/Loot/OS/GentooStudio$ md5sum test7.tar 
57d04e28e6dc4fbf90f466442a4f6db6  test7.tar
~/Loot/OS/GentooStudio$ tar -tf test7.tar > tarlist.txt
~/Loot/OS/GentooStudio$ less tarlist.txt 
...
~/Loot/OS/GentooStudio$ wc -l tarlist.txt 
499337 tarlist.txt

All OK. Let's see if I can manage to untar an archive correctly this time... :lol:

[allan_k]

Hi All,

rt-sources hasn't been updated in a while, and is without a maintainer ..

BTW - if you are doing audio but not MIDI it's not that important, but I've found it makes a huge difference to MIDI timing..


SO basically you can do it yourself pretty easily from a vanilla kernel..

So .. currently the latest rt-patch is for 5.0.14 (it's always a little bit behind) ..

Download the patch .. https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel ... 9.patch.xz
Download the kernel source .. https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/lin ... .14.tar.xz

The verification signs (if you are paranoid are available on those sites too)

decompress (tar -xvf) the above files..
Copy the patch file into the top directory of the kenel sources


Apply the patch
patch -p1 < patch-5.0.14-rt9.patch

If you've done this under /usr/src, You can go ahead and build the kernel as you normally would.

If you use genkernel like me you just need to create the symlink (as per normal process)..

Hope this helps people..

[arnvidr]

I've found it easiest to maintain my own rt-sources ebuilds, I've done that since before the recent period when rt-sources was officially maintained.

Upgrading is mostly just copying the ebuild to a new name, and checking for the correct genpatches version (which is not necessary, but is nice to stay kind of "official").

[Dominique_71]

I put back a radium ebuild into the old pro-audio overlay. It work fine for me and is using EAPI 7. Radium provide its own version of several libraries and its developer insist on that. It is why it will probably never go into portage. My ebuild use the provided libraries at the exception of the vst-sdk (updated to 2.4 in the overlay, a 3.x version will follow when I get some time), and libxcb. For the vst-sdk, it doesn't matter which version is in use and it was trivial to use the system one. For libxcb, the build system just didn't worked as expected with the complied software (or the inverse, which imply the same non working situation), so I just used the AUR libxcb radium patch.

I also put a lmms[ladspa] ebuild because radium prefer to use the ladspa version of the calf plugins. It is the same ebuild than in portage, but with the ladspa plugins enabled with an USE flag.

Last but not least, if some of you are making ebuilds for audio software and want to share them, it could be an opportunity to join the new proaudio overlay or the old one. The advantage of the new overlay is than it is up-to-date with the latest portage features and is the future of pro audio in gentoo. The advantage of the old overlay is than we can do whatever we want with it, as long we don't skew up existing stuffs, and it provide much more software to portage.

For the old overlay, you can send me a private message and I will give you the details. It would be good if you are also willing to update the existing stuffs in order to make them more consistent and up-to-date with the current portage state. This include EAPI update, repoman fixes and removing/update of dead software. Nothing complicated, but a needed work that just take time and I just don't have enough time for that. Which imply I will welcome any help. I will even be OK if you just want to take care of 1 software and nothing more, the only thing to do is to tell me.

[flyerone]

Hello, I've been wanting to try your distro but I have a positive on the bzip2 corruption level as posted above.

I've actually tried the manual install as I have two other distros on the nvme drive. (I was going to chroot from the running Gentoo). Am I grabbing a too old tarball from the page?

The stage tarballs fail halfway during unpacking or bunzip2, here are my checksums:


sha512sum stage4-amd64-latest.tar.bz2
7c6468aa4e5e02d331ee859ab2c92a02fbe0c965f939ef393d579565f644c9c20d3adaab701df299e2425547f8c4af1d4014a541594a6bdb01b7da0dac06b66f

sha512sum stage4-amd64-latest.tar.bz2.previous
7c6468aa4e5e02d331ee859ab2c92a02fbe0c965f939ef393d579565f644c9c20d3adaab701df299e2425547f8c4af1d4014a541594a6bdb01b7da0dac06b66f

Regards.

[soundrolf]

The newest tarball as of 2020-01-25 on GentooStudio download site https://gentoostudio.org/src/builds/complete/
is still corrupted

This is the break point:

/lib64/firmware/cavium/cnn55xx_se.fw
./lib64/firmware/LICENSE.ipu3_firmware
./lib64/firmware/iwlwifi-6000g2a-6.ucode
./lib64/firmware/LICENCE.it913x
./lib64/firmware/LICENCE.ene_firmware
./lib64/firmware/LICENCE.tda7706-firmware.txt
./lib64/firmware/cmmb_vega_12mhz.inp
./lib64/firmware/iwlwifi-7265-9.ucode
./lib64/firmware/usbdux/
./lib64/firmware/usbdux/usbduxsigma_firmware.asm
./lib64/firmware/usbdux/fx2-include.asm
./lib64/firmware/usbdux/usbduxfast_firmware.asm
./lib64/firmware/usbdux/usbdux_firmware.asm
./lib64/firmware/usbdux/Makefile_dux
./lib64/firmware/liquidio/
./lib64/firmware/liquidio/lio_23xx_vsw.bin <-------- same break position on archive 2020-01-18 and 2020-01-25

bzip2: Data integrity error when decompressing.
Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout)

It is possible that the compressed file(s) have become corrupted.
You can use the -tvv option to test integrity of such files.

You can use the `bzip2recover' program to attempt to recover
data from undamaged sections of corrupted files.

exactly at the same position it breaks, like the stage4 archive as of 2020-01-18

Downloaded with
wget https://gentoostudio.org/src/builds/sta ... st.tar.bz2
wget https://gentoostudio.org/src/builds/sta ... 2.previous

Unpacked it in an seperate directory with
tar xvjpf stage4-amd64-latest.tar.bz2 --xattrs --numeric-owner
tar xvjpf stage4-amd64-latest.tar.bz2.previous --xattrs --numeric-owner

breaks as discribed

regards from soundrolf