Troubleshooting Sound Cards under GNU/Linux
Source: Linux Orbit
It happens to everyone eventually. You walk into the office, turn on the desktop PC and you're greeted with ugly beeping and no video. The slightly acrid tang of electrical smoke reaches your nostrils and you know that before you've even begun your day, it's already over. You say a small prayer to the computing gods that it's not the hard drive that's fried and you turn everything off before you begin unplugging peripherals.
"Where did I put the receipt?" you wonder as you do a little quick math in your head to make sure you're still under warranty. Time to call tech support. Get in the queue. Hurry up and wait.
Indeed. PCs are born to die like the rest of us and my brand new (well, 6 months old is pretty new) desktop PC kicked the bucket the last week of January 2002. 1.33 GHz Athlon T-birds run hot, and mine ran a little too hot. Bye-bye motherboard, bye-bye processor, we hardly knew ye.
A week or so later when my local PC vendor finally got the replacement processor in from AMD, I was given a choice. The motherboard (made by Gigabyte) was going to have to be replaced with a newer board, or I was going to have to wait another two weeks while the older broken one was sent off for repairs. I opted for the new motherboard (also from Gigabyte) because I wanted my computer back. My substitute for the week had been a K6III 400 MHz machine that worked just fine, but was frustratingly slow. Speed might kill, but once you work on a fast PC, going back to a slower one is like getting your teeth drilled without the novocaine.
