Dependence on Gnome's System Menu

[Scott James Remnant]

On 2/22/06, Rocco Stanzione <grasshopper at linuxkungfu.org> wrote:

> As a non-Gnome user I've become increasingly frustrated with Ubuntu's
> dependence on Gnome's configuration/administration interfaces.  My first
> problem was with the removal of alsaconf, which admittedly sucks, in favor of
> using the Gnome interface.
>
Actually, alsaconf has primarily been disabled because we don't need
it.  It's job is to select which sound card drivers get loaded, and
arrange modprobe aliases so that if you attempt to write to the
/dev/snd/* device the right driver gets loaded and the right card gets
used.

That's all a bit 1990s.

We do the exact opposite in Ubuntu.  At boot time we load the drivers
for all of the connected cards, and create the /dev filesystem as we
go.  If no driver has been loaded, then there's no /dev/snd, so
there's no way for the alsaconf aliases to actually work.

The only thing you need do is tell the system which soundcard should
be the default if you have more than one, and we supply both console
and graphical interfaces for that.