I'm lost.

I want to learn to use PD on Ubuntu, but I'm having problems. PD runs very, very slow. It takes about 1 minute to open a new document, and I can't get any sound when I use the test module.

I've looked around on these forums as well as on the Ubuntu forums, but everything seems either irrelevant to my situation, or possibly relevant but over my head.

I could give up and stick with Windows, but I really want to give Ubuntu a chance.

Please help!

What version of PD are you using? I think most of us recommend Hans' installers found here: http://at.or.at/hans/pd/installers.html
There is a debian package there that you can download and install with Gdebi or dpkg.

Make sure you are using a sound server that makes sense, most people prefer ALSA or Jack. For jack you need to install jackd, using apt-get or synaptic, there is a GUI for jack called qjackctl as well. To see if ALSA is set up right enter this in a terminal environment;

aplay -l

This should spout out your sound card info if the modules are loaded correctly. If this works try;

speaker-test

(ctl-c exits)

I'd be interested in knowing what hardware you are running on. Even my old pos powerbook g4 is well supported by linux now (including the graphics drivers!!!!)

my 2 cents.

if you have one of this intel HDA chipset soundcard like the one i have on my Dell inspiron 6400, i have bad news : if you ever succeed to have audio it will crack a lot even if you set a damn big buffer on alsa or jack application. And this with even if using the realtime kernel that come with ubuntustudio (gutsy).

nothing to do for that?

just use another sound card is it right?

is a problem with alsa and ubuntu implementation of it?

@newlin said:

I want to learn to use PD on Ubuntu, but I'm having problems. PD runs very, very slow. It takes about 1 minute to open a new document

This is a bug in certain Pd-extended test versions, as far as I know the latest version has a fix (but I don't use ubuntu or pd-extended, so i'm not sure).

For the audio problems, could be that ubuntu has a sound server (eg: arts, esd, pulseaudio, ...) running.

. . . just noticed how old this thread is, ah well...

@thenoiser said:

nothing to do for that?

just use another sound card is it right?

is a problem with alsa and ubuntu implementation of it?

Intel HDA sound cards are not very Linux-friendly, it is true. Some distributions may be better than others, but it might be cheaper to buy an external card, depending on how much you value the time and stress you spend trying to get it working well.

ok I confirmed!
this all problem with PD / ALSA / JACK is a problem with intel HDA damn soundcard!!!

solutions :

use another sound card

buy a new computer

work out the intel HDA bad driver configuration (default one)