Donnie Berkholz wrote:
...

>On the other side, what is really hard to configure? Where can we
>improve how we set things up when programs are emerged?
>  
>
Don't know that this is really something that can be fixed, but it took 
me quite a long while to track down the cause, and it certainly made for 
a rather poor setup experience.

I'm running an nForce III AMD64 machine, and it turns out that the 
particular on-board sound-card for this machine has a number of "IEC 
958" channels which, when un-muted *disable* (normal, analogue) sound 
output.  That is, it is necessary to *mute* them in alsamixer in order 
to produce any output.  Since someone who's trying to get sound working 
is generally not going to *mute* a channel, there's nothing in the 
interface to tell you how to solve the problem.

    Card: NVidia nForce3
    Chip: C-Media Electronics CMI9739
    Item: IEC958 Capture Valid [Off]

I realise that muting particular channels for ALSA is not likely 
something that can be addressed in an ebuild, but since you asked.

Other things that take quite a bit of work (still working on some of 
them, for that matter) include:

    * Trying to get a Radeon 7500 video card setup to render via DRI in
      xorg took at least 5 or 6 iterations of compiling kernels,
      modifying xorg.conf, rebooting etceteras.
    * Setting up a Wacom Graphire USB tablet so that it doesn't "stick"
      a few pixels from the edge of the screen (unsolved as of yet).
    * Setting up Mozilla Thunderbird to launch Mozilla Firefox on
      clicking a link in an email (I had to both create a shell script
      and manually edit prefs.js to get this working (once I found the
      instructions on how to do it)).
    * Eliminating the (right-ctrl)+shift "compose" keyboard shortcut in
      the xorg "Microsoft" keyboard mapping (documented here a while ago).

Have fun,
Mike

________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com


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