Well, Windows is back on the disk.

[Michael Richter]

> > - Ubuntu, however, got confused by my system having two sound cards in
> > it.  It would randomly switch between them when doing sound-based
> > things.  Or some programs would ONLY go to the undesired sound card
> > (because it was card 0) or simply fail to produce sound at all.  If I
> > removed one sound card, however, and sadly the desired card, all such
> > confusion vanished.
> Someone gave the solution very recently for fixing the confusion among
> two cards.

That would be my reference to Mystic Incantations and half-solved
problems.  Implementing that solution now means that some programs
don't make sound at all.  So there's no more confusing switches. 
There's just some programs not working with sound at all.  It's a step
up -- at least when I do get sound it's OK quality -- but it's not
solved.

> > - Nastiest of all: GNOME just locked up tight when it tried to play
> > the startup sound and couldn't.

> You can use planty GUI's different from Gnome.

I can.  But that puts me even further and further away from Ubuntu,
now, doesn't it?  And it adds more confusion to the end-user
experience to just suddenly change the environment.  Wouldn't it be
better to just not have the sound system kill the GUI?

> Now, let's see what is in this link. Too bad, is in french, but maybe
> you do read french, or friends of yours do ?
> http://www.hns-info.net/article.php3?id_article=4201

I'm English native, German near-native, French semi-competent and
Chinese embarrassing.  ;-)

> To say what's interesting to notice, when you buy a computer, almost
> always Windows is in it. Then when you need more applications you pay
> lots of money for them. When you need help the hotline costs bags of
> money and they are not in a hurry to answer. Here in France a comic
> woman did a sketch 'allllooooo the hotliiiiine ???' -'Yes, stay tuned,
> we'll answer within the three next days!'

Oh, Hell yes!  I've never had a satisfying call into a help line for
software (or hardware, for that matter).  Even some that my employer
paid millions for.  (Literally.)  The thing is, though, that I've
rarely had problems this profound under Windows for basic
functionality.  Indeed only once did I have such problems and the
problems turned out to be a motherboard slowly flaking out.

With Ubuntu it has been mostly an OK-to-good experience.  Except for
sound.  (And I've heard nasty things about printing, but my printer is
currently toast so thankfully I'm not experiencing that particular
nightmare.)  Sound is, quite literally, a show-stopper now.  The times
that I actually want sound are for relaxation and entertainment.  I
just don't appear to be wired correctly to find entertainment and
relaxation through Mystic Incantations.  Perhaps I need to adopt the
Sufi attitude of basically laughing at the absurdity of the world to
catch on.

> Can you share your windows and your applications with your friends ? no
> you can't, if you want to copy the OS to several machines of yours and
> don't have the right license, you can't, if you want to get rid or the
> firewell they installed to put an opensource firewall, you can't get rid
> of it unless you use a big iron bar to kick it out, do you know why ?
> because the software you paid for does not belong to you, but to the
> softwares company. And worse of all, after a few times re-installing,
> the keycode does not work anymore. 'allloooo the hotline ????'  :((

And yet, using Windows XP the past (about) three years on this laptop,
I've never had problems with any of that.  My firewall is external
(because I don't trust self-hosted firewalling at all, MS or no).  I
don't share my Windows disks.  And I've never needed to do anything
with keycodes.

> (How much did you offer for the development of Ubuntu btw ?)

Well, once I get my bearings -- if ever I do -- I will likely start
writing software for it.  Now?  None, of course.  This is the part of
the cycle called "evaluation".

> If a company that develops a non free software crashes, and the format
> of your documents is not known by open applications, your work is lost.

And yet I can count the number of lost documents I've had since about
1985 on one hand.

> And also, during the time I'm learning to look forward and see the
> moment I'll learn to compile a kernel, you'll know all the types of
> firewalls and anti-virii/anti-all_malwares, while I'm running 3
> different distributions to learn how to make them function, as well as a
> bunch of applications... now my harware does not fail anymore, it's more
> cool...

My hardware has failed more often in the past three weeks than it has
in the three years previous.  Don't be trying to talk about hardware
not failing to me here....

>  Solution: install with  a dual boot, and
> forget the hard life ?

That is, in fact, the solution I adopted.  I just don't like the fact
I had to.  Sound is a very basic piece of functionality that has been
SOLVED in Windows, BeOS, MacOS (various versions, no less!) and a
whole host of other systems for a long time.  Only here in Linux-land
does it appear to be a nightmare of Mystic Incantations.

--
Michael T. Richter
ttmrichter at gmail.com
Jabber: mtr1966 at jabber.cn