It’s been a long rampup to camp for me already, and camp doesn’t officially start until tomorrow (well, later today). We did the Diagnostic O written test online this year, and since I’m the one that suggested it and have the skills, I was responsible for implementing it. Not that I’m complaining … it really is a cool project, it’s just my timeline really sucked. I waited too long to really get started, and that left me almost too little time to get all the core features completed before we needed to roll it out to everyone.

But, all of that to say, I’m not the only one up late. There are still last minute test takers going right now. An email was sent out earlier today giving an official cutoff of 8AM CST on Saturday and there have been quite a few new users and test attempts since. If only more of the students had completed it … we just had barely broken 50% this morning.

I guess there are still a couple of hours ……….

Here’s where the story gets ugly … I didn’t have any sound when the machine came back up. No sound! How am I supposed to watch a DVD without sound? It seems that the few applications I have that still have OSS support will function if I manually set them to OSS and not ALSA, but those apps are in the minority by far these days.

So, it’s been a couple of days and there haven’t been any ‘whoops’ updates to ALSA, nor does there appear to be a flurry of activity on the Web. That leaves me in a bit of a quandry. I don’t know enough about yum, even after digesting the man pages, to try and roll back to an old version to see if that fixes it, nor do I really know enough about ALSA (once upon a time I did, but a lot has changed since then).

What really confuses me is that Fedora has a few utilities for managing sound and sound cards. Some of the ‘can you hear this sound’ checks pass just fine (when selecting a card for instance), but the user level properties that let me select ‘Auto Detect’, or a specific device all fail (unless I select OSS, but even then my apps can’t play sound).

Anyone out there know enough to help? I’m on an IBM Thinkpad R50e that uses the snd_intel8x0 module normally (and it’s currently loaded). Help?!?

The important thing to note here is that I have not used GNOME 2.6, I’m still stuck back on 2.4, and therefore have not used the new spatial Nautilus. There was a nice rebuttal by someone over on their own blog.