[ardour-users] A decent sound card for Ardour

[Dominic Sacré]

On Saturday 10 February 2007 12:03, Atte André Jensen wrote:
> I've been running linux for over 6 years and never had to install a
> single driver by hand.

You've been a lot more lucky than me then. I've had to manually install 
drivers countless times, either because my distribution did not have the 
driver I needed at all, or because it included a version of the driver 
that simply was not functional.

The devices in question include graphics cards, a tv tuner card (ivtv), a 
graphics tablet (wacom), various pieces of wifi hardware, a winmodem, and 
others. In the best case, all I needed to do was download and install one 
package. In the worst case, I had to dig deep into makefiles and source 
code to get things working. Although I must admit that in some cases, 
this was a challenge that was actually fun (for me), this is not 
something the average Linux user should have to do.

By the way, these are all experiences from the past year I'm talking 
about, mostly using Ubuntu Dapper.

So I fully understand the need for a single, simple way to install drivers 
on Linux. I like the idea of having all drivers included in the 
distribution, but let's face it, a distribution that fully works out of 
the box, on every piece of hardware, is just not going to happen.

Having said that, I've had very little trouble with audio hardware, mostly 
because I've always had the possibility to choose devices which were known 
to work smoothly, and avoid the others. But in way too many cases, you 
just don't have this choice.

Cheers,
    Dominic