[H-GEN] newbie help

[Anthony Towns]

On Sat, Apr 01, 2000 at 11:50:45AM +1000, Frank Brand wrote:
> Craig Eldershaw wrote:
> > >1: Sound.  Corel uses the kde desktop (on top of what is basically a
> > Try 'cat /dev/sndstat' to see what of the oss the kernel thinks are
> > installed.  If that looks OK, then try getting a small .au file and try
> > 'cat sound.au >/dev/audio' to see if that makes any noise.
> I am not trying to be cute and I know you are a talented and helpful
> respondent but I see this kind of reply often on HUMBUG. How would a
> newbie know what looked OK when they ran sndstat? Some newbies are
> knowledgable and know these things but the vast majority are not and
> would not know whether the output looked good or not. 

Well, first of all they can guess. Then they can compare against their
manuals, to see if any of the information matches, or is obviously wrong.
Then they can post the contents of /dev/sndstat to the list saying
`ummm, i dunno, does this look right?' and go through the whole `depends,
what sort of card do you have? what are your settings?' cycle.

Seems better than treating everyone who asks questions like a complete
idiot, and explaining everything from the word go.

And I haven't been following the thread, but these hints seem to have
gotten Sarah far enough along that her sound more or less works. Isn't
that the true measure of whether the tech support is good or not?

> Red Hat has a nice little utility called sndconfig which is very useful
> but I do not know whether this is in the Debian/Corel distros.

I couldn't see it...

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.

 ``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it 
        results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
                                        -- Linus Torvalds
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