I ended up never installing 9.04 (Jaunty). This time around, I even made my way to a release party (at Gnutiken) to install the latest Ubuntu release. I have to say, it was a painless and quick process and everything seems faster (it might also be because I installed the 64 bit version...).
This time, I installed the regular Ubuntu, instead of Ubuntu Studio. The steps to get things going from here:
1. I installed linux-image-rt (the realtime kernel)
2. I installed some audio software (apt-get install ardour hydrogen gave me most of the necessary stuff like jack and qjackctl).
2. I added my user to the 'audio' group and logged out / logged in.
3. To get access to the firewire device, I did modprobe raw1394 and chmod a+rw /dev/raw1394 (I learned this from my own blog)
4. I set up qjackctl to use the FFADO plugin with a buffer size of 512 and it worked!
I haven't been able to test it much yet, but playback from Ardour seems to work fine enough. Hooray for 9.10!
