[Fluxus] Noob audio connection question

[Matt Jadud]

Hi all,

I offered to my students the opportunity to do something creative for
their final projects this semester. One of them wanted to do some
livecoding in Fluxus. This is awesome.

Our sysadmin got 0.14 installed against PLT 372 using Redhat RPMs.
Hopefully, that's "stable enough" for experimentation. (Also, it's
what is now installed, because it was easiest and quickest. I'm not
going to complain on that count at all.)

The lame part is me not knowing where to start, because I've never sat
down and done any serious playing with Fluxus. Now, I suppose, I'll
learn. :) I got Fluxus up, and drew a cube---that was awesome, and I'd
be ready to quit there under normal circumstances, but figure I should
do better. The thing that I really got stuck on was audio: how should
my student plug audio into Fluxus so that Cool Stuff can happen?
Having an audio even stream to tap into seems like a good first step
in doing some awesomeness with Fluxus.

It looks like jackd has been installed, and I can only start it with
the ALSA driver. (Currently, there isn't any support for any other
driver.) I have a few audio players on the system, and they seem to be
able to output to a variety of things; in particular, the GPlayer (I
think that is what it was called) can output to either "jack" or
"alsa", but... I've never played in this space with Linux before, so
I'm not sure what I should do to make the bits plug together.

Is there a manual page somewhere that I can RTFM, or does the list
mind if I ask a sequence of questions here to get things up and
running? We're running RH9 (I'm pretty sure... need to double-check),
and I have no privs on the systems at the moment, nor (I hope) should
I need them. The machines have reasonable 3D support, and audio works,
because I see students listening to music in the labs off of the
machines. (I'm new this academic year, so there are still details of
our systems that I'm discovering.)

Normally, I'd spend many hours figuring this out myself, but I don't
have those hours. Hence, I'm appealing to the FluxusHiveMind... even
though I couldn't find a page on the wiki for it, I'm sure the hive
mind exists.

Cheers,
Matt