Soundcard/Alsa stuff

[Michiel Sikkes]

Hello everyone,

I have installed Ubuntu Linux the other day after hearing the great
things about it and I am already migrating from Debian GNU/Linux to
Ubuntu Linux, great work Ubuntu!

The whole installation went trough in a simple 'swoop' and it 'just
worked', this was great. However I've found two problems and I don't
know wether these are actually bugs or even if they can be solved:


(1) The horizsync and vertrefresh values where wrong in the initial X
config. I have no idea where these values are fetched from by default or
even if they can be auto-deteced by checking which monitor is on the
other end of the cable. Bottom line is, I had to set the horizsync and
vertrefresh manually to display a refreshrate higher then 60hz.

(2) Hotplug was great for detecting my sound cards and tv cards. Maybe a
bit too great :-). When the three snd_ modules where loaded, the module
for my tv card was loaded first, so this was the "default" alsa mixer
device, which is not good for a new user: The new user installs Ubuntu,
and tries to play a media file from somewhere and discovers there is no
sound coming out of his speakers and has no idea where to look.

My first suggestion is to auto-detect wether the the default device is
actually a sound card, I wouldn't know how, but this would be a nice
solution. My second suggestion is that we need some kind of multimedia
device capplet, if we haven't already got one.


These are just two things I like to mention, and it would of course be
really great if we could find a solution to them :-). Apart from these
two I really have no other issues with Ubuntu, nice!

Kind regards,
Michiel

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