Sometimes you just gotta give to the greater forces in the universe. Case in point: My netbook.

I have tried everything – Windows XP, Windows 7, Debian, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Arch, Ubuntu, and finally back to Debian – and no matter what I do, I cannot get good audio performance out of this little bastard of Satan’s loins. The most frustrating aspect of my journey was realizing (tonight, oddly enough) that I’ve become better at compiling applications than using them, and that’s bad. For all of the work that I’ve dumped into making this system sing, I haven’t actually made it play.

Really, it’s a great netbook. To be perfectly honest, Debian Squeeze has been my best experience to date. If you use it as a netbook, it works wonderfully well, The second you try to do something out-of-the-ordinary with it (i.e., build a new kernel for doing some simple audio sampling or what-not), it fails.

At this point it’s probably best to cut my losses and forget about it. Or, be happy with just the few apps that might perform reasonably well, like the MIDI sequencers, and be done with it. Compiling, searching, trying to make something more of a system is something of an addiction of mine, so I doubt I’ll stop. Still, it’s fscking annoying.