[Preston] Detection of Sound Cards

[Andrew King]

Hi there!

What do people use to set up sound cards under Linux these days?

Under BSD, it "just works".  Provided that the kernel sees it and loads 
the driver ok, then you can just go ahead and start using software 
applications such as ogg123 or waveplay.

Under Red Hat, I always used this program called sndconfig, which, three 
times out of four, would figure out what card I had, set it up and then 
play a sound sample.  If it didn't figure it out it'd let me choose from 
a list, and again that'd often work.

When I switched to Debian (what I'm using now), I got sndconfig from the 
APT system.  That worked fine for a while, but now fails at regular 
intervals with a segfault or an error about writing things to files.

I realise that some (probably at least Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSe) set 
things up during the install, but if anyone could tell me if there's a 
generic tool that can be downloaded, or if it's just a simple case of 
some change in a config file or two somewhere, I'd be grateful to hear.

Kernel is 2.4 for now - have got 2.6 and considered going with Alsa, but 
setting it up and getting it working looks like the kind of thing 
that'll take all night - haven't found clear instructions which'd make 
it any quicker yet.

Andrew