I've been traveling, so I haven't had the time to respond to your mail
quickly.
I'm also sorry to hear about your frustration with ALSA. In my own
experience, I've had the best/easiest time using external USB sound cards,
which rely on the same driver for all cards. I've used two external sound
cards (a Roland and a SoundBlaster Extigy USB and both have worked fine).
There are certain SoundBlaster cards known not to work with ALSA, however.
(I think it's especially the SoundBlaster Audigy that causes the most
problems). Your PCI cards may be among them.
The ALSA project documentation has an extensive list of hardware and
whether it is known to work (or not). You can find that at this address:
Another odd thing about ALSA sound has to do with ALSA notation when
setting up the sound card, either in the new gLiveSupport's Options->Sound
menu or directly in the scheduler.xml and gLiveSupport.xml config files:
For whatever reason, I get sound when I install the alsa-oss module and
then use OSS-style notation, i.e. /dev/dsp, /dev/dsp0, /dev/dsp1, etc.
I don't know also if you've checked our 'Cheat Sheet' document, which
outlines several command-line steps you can use with LiveSupport, including
how to identify your sound card assignations. That document is at:
Thanks for the reply. I may actually go and get some USB devices, then. I haven't rebuilt the machine yet, so I may be in luck. I'm not giving up, just extending the deadline...