Admittedly a gimmick, but worth following through:

http://www.giganews.com is pretty awesome and I hope I can get some great usenet.

Well, I'm back up and running.  A nice, new, quiet, powerful PSU (that may be a slight bit too big for my case's original screw holes) is sitting in my case, running my computer.  Now to get back to business.

Where I last left off, I had done some SVN installs of FFADO and JACK to test, but I was getting no success. I started to hypothesize that they haven't developed firewire 800 support yet, as none of the units preceding this one had firewire 800 capabilities. Now I'm running off of that theory and hunting around for my old, 15' long firewire 400 cable. I will be checking my brother's place for it shortly, and, hopefully, I'll have it tracked down in no time.

Due to some unforseen hardware issues (my PSU (I think) has developed an extensive, high pitch whistling) I haven't been able to make much progress. I can hear it and it's driving me batty. I have thoroughly narrowed it down to one of the following, my PSU, my motherboard, or my CPU. I highly doubt it's the CPU, probably not the mobo, so that leaves the PSU. Until I get it fixed/replaced, I can't put forth more work on this project...

Hardware

Well, my first hardware upgrade arrived, I now am running 8 GB of RAM (the maximum available).  I was going to wait for a new hard drive as well, however I have figured out that I can get away with clearing one of my currently existing hard drives.  As such I have installed Sabayon one that drive.

Now it's worth noting that I am still running OS X primarily and will not be jumping ship to Linux for a little while.  I have a number of reasons, many of them personal, some are simple.  Primarily, I need a functional method of transferring the files I have from HFS+ to EXT4 drives, so if anyone has any elegant suggestions, I'd be happy to take them. 

Currently the only thing coming to mind is to use the mediocre HFS+ drivers in the Linux Kernel.  I have heard that these drivers don't work all too well, however I'm guessing read support is pretty stable, so that's currently my plan.  I'm thinking about trying to do it in VirtualBox/VMWare/Parallels/whatever I can use that will support raw drives, if I can manage to do "network shares" of my HFS+ drives.  Of course, there's still some reasons that I'm not jumping ship yet, but those will pass shortly.

And one of the best bits of news is that the Fireface 400 (the little sister to my unit) is now functional under FFADO.  Still not considered fully functional and stable, but that's okay.  It's a big step in the right direction.  Can't wait to get my unit working natively in Linux.

Time to test

So my little hack method looks like it might work.  I'm going to try this right now.  I've got SPDIF output from my onboard audio card and I'm running it to my Fireface.  I've never tried using the device in stand-alone mode, so now, I'll be rebooting, plugging my DVD-RW drive back in (yes, I know, I've been working for months without a disc drive on my hackintosh and it's been fine), booting into Sabayon 8 KDE LiveDVD.  With any luck, I'll hear the startup sounds that they have by default.

EDIT: Looks like I'm up and running. Currently I do not have the audio through my speakers like I was hoping, but I'm also not terribly surprised at this outcome. I believe I forgot to save the settings to the speaker channels, but I have it in my headphones, which means that I can operate under this system.

It'll still take some tweaking, as of right now, I am not installing, for various reasons (top of which being hard drive space, lower being time, and lowest being figuring out dual-booting), but this liveDVD (Sabayon 8) has me hopeful. For right now, I'm going to see how well the system survives without me rebooting into OS X today. It means I'm going to be emailing and everything from my laptop for now (simply because I don't feel like configuring KMail, Thunderbird, or whatever other client I feel like using), but I'm looking forward to a fuller Linux experience. By for now!

A Decision has been made (kind of)

So I've come to a couple decisions as far as distributions are concerned.  The two decisions that I've come to are that: A.  I do not want all the fluff of a general purpose computer running on my recording device and B. I still want a general purpose computer.  As such, I'm going to run two separate installs, one for general purpose and one for Audio.  This should be simple enough to do, and, while I'm in the general purpose one, I can still do some audio work, just not as extreme as the audio one.

As of right now, I'm thinking Sabayon for the GP install and Gentoo for the audio one.  Of course, I'm not 100% on that yet, I still would like to play around with Debian and a couple other distributions that have similar mentalities to Gentoo (build your system to your liking).  I'd also like to try Ubuntu, if only to see this new Unity interface that I've heard so much about, and I'm going to see how SuSE holds up these days (last I used it, I was moderately impressed but there were still things that just didn't feel right), but I'll take suggestions for others.

Regardless, I wish I could just run things in the real world, not virtualized, but my system currently isn't capable of wiring up that way.  I could probably come up with a good ole "hardhack" style solution, which I may do sooner rather than later.

Someone Beat me to it!

So I'm not even a month into this and I'm already second guessing just about everything I'm doing.  I just found this: http://audiodef.com/projects.php?project_id=1 while I was diagnosing an issue I was having and am seriously considering just following this guide.  Furthermore, I'm almost certain that I shouldn't be bothering with Parallels as it's extremely annoying that I cannot install their stupid tools in a current Linux environment.  I'm still using Parallels 5 and I'm not looking to upgrade.

So, seeing as I'm going all open source on everything, I'm going to invest some time into VirtualBox and go that route.  I plan on doing the verbatim install listed on the above guide in VirtualBox, but I also plan on re-doing said install once my computer is up and running.  I will definitely be using a separate /home partition (for those non-Linux types, /home is like the Users folder in OS X, putting it on a separate partition or even a separate drive gives the user(s) that entire partition and drive for their files and configurations.  If you were to, say, mess up a system installed, you'd still have all your desktop, your icons, your widgets, etc. readily available) so when the time comes, I can just copy that over.

I'm actually quite excited about someone else having already done this.  Of course, his hardware is already supported whereas mine, unfortunately, is not yet.  I'm anxiously anticipating the time when I can actually start testing my system in Linux with sound working and everything, but until then, I can follow this guide, run into issues, fix them, break some more, and then see where it gets me.