text versus gui (why sound is broken)

[Danny Yee]

Having spent yet another few hours trying to get sound to work on
my system -- I'm back to a state where I need to reboot to get it to
work again -- I've decided the problems with the sound system are at
least partly because it's almost entirely managed by gui tools.

If there were a full set of command-line tools for managing sound, it
would be much easier to diagnose problems, and much easier to fix them.
Instead, we need to fiddle with gui interfaces (X11 or ncurses) in
system-config-soundcard, pavucontrol, gst-mixer, alsamixer, etc. to
work out whether it's a problem with drivers, with muting somewhere,
with applications talking to the wrong sound system, or something else.

(Again, does anyone have any recommendations for a cheap sound card
that will work reliably with Fedora?  Maybe a third of my sound
problems are driver/module problems where system-config-soundcard
won't make a sound and a reboot is required.)

Danny.