I beg your pardon, I never promised you a Rosegarden, part 2

I wrote that Rosegarden doesn't run properly in a SUSE Linux 10 VMware session. Well, it turns out to be rather different to what I thought.

After that post, I installed Rosegarden directly in my host SUSE 10 installation, i.e. not in VMware. Guess what? I had exactly the same problem. So VMware wasn't the issue; in fact, VMware did a perfect job of replicating the behaviour on my physical laptop. So what was the problem?

I'm still in the process of tracking it down with the help of the Rosegarden developers on their mailing list, but the thing we are looking at is the system timer resolution. It used to be that Linux systems had a timer resolution of 10msec (milliseconds). They could not time anything more accurately than that. This is not good enough for MIDI, since people can hear that size of delay in a piece of music. Recent Linux versions (and I assume this included SUSE Linux Pro 9.3) reduced the resolution to 1msec, which is great for audio applications. However, there were apparently some issues for some applications with the ten-fold increase in timer-related CPU activity.

It seems that in SUSE Linux 10, the system timer resolution is now 4msec. While this is better than 10, it's a lot worse than 1msec. This may be the reason for the problem with Rosegarden, but it's far from certain as yet. The jury is still out; I'll let you know when and if there is a solution. I certainly want and need a solution.