Turning an old laptop into a Linux DAW

2025-07-20

I live among heaps of audio recording equipement that my husband has hoarded over the years. He's OK with my plants, and I am OK with his studio gear.

I've installed Ardour (a digital audio workstation) and some plugins on my laptop, but I think it would be more convenient to have a dedicated machine already set up for recording. That way we can just turn it on and we're ready to make music. I can't be bothered with unplugging my laptop, moving it, plugging it in and connecting the audio interface every time.

Since we both use Arch Linux, I decided to install it on a spare ThinkPad T480 we have lying around and set it up for recording.

Let's start off with a simple Arch install. I already have Ventoy installed on a flash drive. I recently used it to install Debian on my dad's computer, a topic I may explore in another post (administrating your parents' computers is much easier with Linux). Anyway, installing Arch is not hard, especially recently since they added an installer.

After booting into the install media (F12 on a Thinkpad), let's connect to the internet (so the installer can download packages):

  1. Open iwctl
  2. List devices with device list - my device is wlan0
  3. Start scanning networks with station wlan0 scan
  4. List local networks with station wlan0 get-networks
  5. Connect station wlan0 connect your_network_name
  6. Exit with CTRL+D
  7. Pinging something confirms that we have connection and may proceed.

Arch now has a convenient installer, archinstall. Ours will be a minimalistic install for a computer which will be only used for audio work (play, more likely). As such we won't deviate much from the default settings.

We will use the best-effort default partition layout with btrfs as the file system (press escape to skip enabling compression or disabling CoW).

Few other settings remain:

We'll finish the setup after Arch installs.

First, let's install some quality of life things: a browser (Firefox) and an AUR helper like paru.

Now, let's finish the main part of the setup with the help of the Professional audio Arch Wiki page and this comprehensive guide.

Personally, I opted for the most modern solution, pipewire with pipewire-jack. It works just fine right out of the box.

I won't blindly copy steps from those guides, that would bring no extra value for you. But yes, it's that simple, just installing a couple of packages and editing a couple of files is enough to get you started recording.

I would just suggest that you find the Arch wiki page for your machine and follow instructions to get sleep/suspend working, if there are some. It is so nice to be able to wake up the computer and start playing in seconds.

As a final note, we are using a Tascam US-16x08 audio interface, and it works great, as does Andrej's old Behringer UMC404HD. There is nothing special you need to do to get either working, just pick them in Ardour on startup.

You can install a billion plugins (installing Windows' ones is also often possible), but for recording your voice and some hardware instruments, this is quite enough. If you're only doing that, Ardour works fine even on older machines, so I hope this inspires you to repurpose your old laptops into little Linux DAWs.