Re: [Alsa-user] How do I set the default sound card?

[Ronny S. <Ron...@gm...>]

Hi all,

> Sounds like Redhat/Fedora's system-config-soundcard, that indeed can
> set the order. On Gentoo you can emerge that package. Also SuSE's YaST
> can do that. So i'd say this is distro-specific, not DE specific.

OK, I downloaded and installed Fedora Core 6. Indeed, there is this soundcard 
configuration tool Lee was talking about. I tested it out a bit. Here is the 
not so short summary:

The good news is that it correctly doesn't show the webcam as sound output 
device. All remaining news are more or less bad. ;-)
In the sound recording device section are two "USB Audio" entries. It is not 
visible which entry is the webcam and which one is the headset. In the evil 
operating system the entries have distinguishable and descriptive names 
(<Company> Webcam, <Company> Headset).
After selecting the headset as primary sound output device nothing happens. 
All the sounds are still played using the on-board soundcard. Logging on and 
off doesn't help either. I had to restart the system to apply the settings. 
(I probably could have just restarted a system service but I choose to work 
from a normal users perspective.)
The same problem plagues the fallback strategy. After unplugging the headset 
there was no sound output anymore. Logging on and off again didn't help. 
After a restart the on-board soundcard was used.

The short summary is that with Linux we have no support from the desktop 
enviroments and a vendor specific tool that fails in almost every aspect.

I made some proposals at the kde-linux mailing list: 
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-linux&m=116803699028792&w=2
What do you think about this proposal?

Greetings

Ronny