I like playing music and hate carrying all that heavy equipment. So far my music-gear was all traditional - computer-free. Now I want to hack my way up the stack to put together a working minimal setup:

1. My laptop
2. A USB-2-Midi cable
3. My MIDI keyboard
4. My 3-way foot-pedal
5. A general-midi sound library
6. A head-set

I will un-dust my good-old Rubini kernel driver book and un-dust my packaging skills and see how far I can get. Any help to accelerate that appreciated.

Once this works I have many more ideas along that way:

o Use the foot-pedal signal to switch pages on sheet music while playing which is displayed on my laptop

o Set up my sheet music and MP3 files on an own-cloud instance at home, so that I can retrieve it from anywhere

o Why not put all the things I need for a song on a state-of-the-art website that I can easily display even on my cell-phone (camp-fire mode ;-))

o Everybody talks about containerization - so let's create a real Digital Audio Workstation using Ardour (http://ardour.org/) run as a container on top of a SUSE distro

o ...