[ardour-users] A decent sound card for Ardour

[John Emmas]

No disrespect Atte - but you've missed the point I was making.

I don't doubt that there are many users like you, for whom the standard
installation worked first time.  My point is this, however....  when the
standard drivers DON'T work, there is no standard procedure for replacing or
upgrading them.  There's a whole myriad of confusing procedures and if you
use a bad one (or the wrong one) you can easily bring your whole system
down.  Here's an example:-

These are the official instructions for making your sound card work under
Ubuntu:-

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449

Note that there's an easy way and a more complicated way.  If the easy
method doesn't work for you, you're advised to try the harder method.  The
hard method starts by uninstalling a load of unrelated stuff (such as your
desktop / GDM / CD ROM drive etc).  It then installs the alsa sound packages
and reinstalls the stuff it previously removed.  But it doesn't re-install
them from some backup it made.... it gets everything afresh from a
repository.  So, what you end up with might not be what you started off
with.

In my case, I was left with a non-working CD ROM drive and my twin monitor,
hi-res, dual-head display was knocked back to a lousy, single monitor
display running at the wrong refresh rate.

It's this kind of thing that gets Linux a bad name.  Few hardware
manufacturers would want.to be associated with installation procedures that
can bring down somebody's whole system.  Why should they risk it?
Especially when the same hardware can be run on a Windows box that doesn't
suffer from those problems (and yes, I know that Windows used to have a
haphazard range of installation procedures - but it doesn't any more.
That's the point).

I'm not a gambling man myself, but if I was a hardware manufacturer, I know
which horse I'd be inclined to back.

John