[timidity-talk] how to turn a midi keyboard into an electronic piano

[Zhang W. <zha...@re...>]

Hello. I have a midi keyboard, once connected to my PC, cat /dev/midi
would produce junk text when I press the keys, thus I consider it
properly installed.

And the PC runs Debian Lenny, timidity runs by /etc/init.d/timidity, and
pmidi -p128:0 plays midi files just fine, so I think midi output is
working.

Now I am trying to connect the two, with the intention to use midi
keyboard + PC as an electronic piano. I hope I can start to play without
any feature like recording, mixing, composing, showing musical notes etc
and get to know other features slowly (really slow, I hope I can manage
other technical in one year or so) so i want to avoid diving into
complicated software like RoseGarden (it require jackd which is damn
difficult to get working right and stable on my PC, tired 2 days!
consider I am 4-year experienced Linux sysadmin this is really
difficult). is there a way to simply "connect" midi keyboard with a
minimal software that can play it?

A traditional Linux user would imagine:
$ something < /dev/midi > timidity 
would work, after googling it seems obvious musician/geek think
differently.

Thanks in advance for hints!

P.S. I tried several days to run MusE/RoseGarden/seq24 while could not
making them work, and frustrated knowing what I need is only a fraction
of what these software I am working on.