Presonus Firebox

I got me one of these - Presonus Firebox Firewire 24/96 audio interface. It's awesome, and comes with two microphone preamps.

Ubuntu 9.04

To get this device working, we need a real-time kernel, the jack audio server, and ardour to do actual useful editing. The easiest way to do this is to simply install Ubuntu Studio:

apt-get install ubuntustudio-audio

Or:

sudo apt-get install linux-rt linux-headers-rt qjackctl ardour

Add the following to the bottom of /etc/security/limits.conf to set up real-time audio:

@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - memlock 250000
@audio - nice -10

Get udev to find your Firewire gadgets and set up the permissions properly. If not already, create a /etc/udev/40-linux1394.rules file and add the following:

KERNEL="raw1394", NAME="%k"
KERNEL="dv1394*", NAME="dv1394/%n"
KERNEL="video1394*", NAME="video1394/%n"
KERNEL="raw1394", GROUP="rawfw"

Create the rawfw group and add yourself to it. Only these users will have access to the raw Firewire interface:

groupadd rawfw
sudo adduser username rawfw

Finally, in the Jack GUI setup, use the freebob driver and ensure the Realtime option is ticked.