And why would EBCDIC make audio any harder to implement than on an ASCII or UNICODE based OS/machine?
Because audio files usually come in a human readable, XML based format, of course.
Is your Phil Collins greatest hits collection sounding a bit like a German industrial band? Probably chose the wrong code page for the conversion!
Ok, this next bit happened at least 6 times: I installed the drivers according to instructions, and X booted up extremely garbled, unusable. Then I had to manually restore my xorg.conf file to get back to gnome.
There. Somewhere during or after those times i had to reinstall Ubuntu 2 times because I just didn't know what to do anymore and wanted a clean start. Yes, I tried installing them from scratch, with instructions on a clean install. Did not work. After a unspecified amount of time and despair I simply gave up. I called a friend who knew enough to get them working but not after extreme pain. And the card never worked perfectly. For example I could never get Metacity working properly, just complaints about the drivers.
So no, Ubuntu or any Linux for that matter, is NOT ready for the masses.
"There is such a fine line between genius and stupidity." - David St. Hubbins, "Spinal Tap"