Re: Help on Octal capabilities

[David O'Toole]

> 1. Would it be possible to operate Octal from a X terminal connected to
> the computer actually running it? I ask this because would like my

That should work, as long as the laptop is running an X server. If that is
set up properly the remote display should work, though I must say from my
experience that running a graphical application (i.e. things more
advanced than xfontsel) can be a bit slow over a network line.

> 2. My current desktop is now a 486/100. It does a really nice job
> under Windows 3.1, as it mixes 4 44100 Hz 16 bits tracks in real time
> using the Quad multitracker (Turtle Beach) while running Cakewalk for

I'm not completely sure. I suspect it would work fine if all you were
doing was basic sample playback/mixing. But keep in mind Octal's internal
audio format is 32-bit IEEE floating point, not 16-bit integers like in a
tracker program. On recent processors that is no problem, but I remember
from my DOS days a lot of stuff about the need to avoid floating point
because back then it was often slower. So it may just have to be trial and
error.

> Also, it would be very helpful to know of any GNU/Linux distributions
> that already include Octal as a package ready to use; most of us

None of them currently include Octal, because it isn't ready for general
use. The core is working but the UI isn't finished, and probably won't
call RedHat and Debian until that happens :-)

> do that. Please note that the graphical environment would not slow down
> the 486 as all the graphics would be hopefully generated in the X
> terminal of the laptop, which is a Pentium.

I'm not sure this would make a difference because the work would still be
happening on the Octal box---all the display requests etc. and pumping the
events through the network.

A better bet might be the client/server version (where we have a
"headless" backend communicating over a socket) but it remains to be seen
whether that will be flexible/efficient/clean enough.

I'm sorry I can't give definite answers yet----the only real test is to
try it out when the sequencer is working.

-- 
@@@ david o'toole
@@@ address@hidden
@@@ www.gnu.org/software/octal