On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 09:35:49AM +1200, Craig Box wrote:
Less customisation. Right now, your fresh install is broken out of the box. You set up ubuntu and sound works. Plug in a usb phone and configure skype to use /dev/dsp1. Cool. The next time you boot the computer, all your system sounds are coming through the phone and skype is using the system speakers. Most users want devices to NOT MOVE ABOUT.
Does this actually happen? What I've seen is Linux assigns things based on something like PCI order, which is likely not to change unless you move cards around.
With USB things, its possible that plugging them in in a different order could swap the /dev/dsp numbers, but with a single PCI sound card and a USB one, I wouldn't expect it to swap.
I've encountered this with video devices - from what I could tell, usb hardware was detected before pci hardware, so if the usb webcam was plugged in on boot, then it got video1 and the pci card got video2. I don't recall the order ever being non-deterministic though :) John