A number of steps are necessary (or recommended) to configure the system for use as a DAW. This is part one of probably quite a few parts where I will discuss what I do as I attempt to set this up.
The first thing I did was to configure rtirq to prioritize the firewire driver. By default, rtirq does not prioritize interrupts for firewire devices. Since I have a Presonus Firebox, I need to change this. This is quite simple to do. I opened the file /etc/sysconfig/rtirq and added ohci to the value of the variable RTIRQ_NAME_LIST, right after the real time clock. It now reads:
RTIRQ_NAME_LIST=”rtc ohci snd usb i8042″
After making this change, you just need to restart the service, and the interrupt threads will be re-prioritized as required.
The next change I made was to create a new group, called audio, and add my account to the group. Now I can configure permissions of the firewire device to be accessible by the audio group, and I will be able to use it. More on that in the next post.