[Techtalk] Sound card gone missing - OSS/ALSA woes

[James Sutherland]

On 17 Mar 2012, at 19:54, Anne Wainwright wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 05:11:00PM +1000, Miriam English wrote:
>> Little Girl wrote:
>> 
>>> When I got my first computer a relative of mine said that I shouldn't
>>> be fearful of it, but just go ahead and mess around with it. He told
>>> me that everybody messes up their computers eventually, that he fully
>>> expected to be called to repair the damage from time to time, and
>>> that messing things up is actually a good thing because it's a
>>> learning process. He was right. I've learned a lot through my
>>> screw-ups over the years. (:
>>> 
>> 
>> I couldn't agree more. Today we have a growing cultural prejudice  
>> against making mistakes, but in truth is one of our most important ways  
>> of learning. I often tell friends who are impressed with the amount I  
>> know on various computery things that it is largely the result of having  
>> made more mistakes than most people. Heaven knows how many times I've  
>> totally screwed up my computers.
>> See also the quote in my sig below.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> 	- Miriam
> I have done my best learning by breaking things and then having to fix
> them. You are supposed to fix things in Linux, this is not Windows where
> a quick reboot can heal all wounds. Keep at it.

For experimentation/newbie-proofing, a virtual machine might be best, as long as the machine has enough RAM and disk space. Set up VirtualBox (free!) on a basic Linux installation, put a Linux system inside that and take a 'snapshot' of it. Then he can play around to his heart's content as root inside the virtual machine; worst case, he trashes it totally, you revert to the snapshot and it's all undone with a mouse click. (Handy for trying out new packages or changes, too: install whatever you like, if it backfires horribly you can just undo it. One or two distros are starting to try integrating this on a filesystem level too, which will be nice: OpenSolaris does/did that.)


James.