(rant) Is there any hope

[Rick Green]

I see some light up ahead in the tunnel!

About once a week since Beta 1 came out at the beginning of the month, 
I've been downloading and trying out the daily build of 12.04.

Today, I saw the best 'out of the box' experience with a live DVD ever!

I booted the DVD on my AMD64 laptop, launched qjackctl, opened the 'setup' 
window, selected the 'firewire' driver, clicked OK, accepting all other 
defults.  Clicked 'start', and jack found my focusrite (pro26io) interface 
and started up.
   I launched Ardour, created a new session, added two mono tracks, plugged 
in an available source of audio, and started recording.  The recording ran 
for 25 minutes with NO xruns until the ramdisk filled up.  It stopped 
recording, threw up a message log window, but DID NOT crash jack.
   I 'rewound' the playhead, hit play.  Switched to a second desktop, 
launched ffado-mixer.  It threw a message about inability to connect to 
the dbus server, but succeeded when I hit 'retry'.  I tweaked some of the 
output mixer settings, and I hear clean audio coming from my monitors.

   This is a base level of stability and pre-configuration that I expect 
from a distro, but have never seen in any distro up to this day.  Kudos to 
the team!

-- 
Rick Green

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
                                   -Benjamin Franklin

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our
safety and our ideals."
                                -President Barack Obama 20 Jan 2009