> I've had exchanges with the audio people that basically went like[...]

Which bug report did you file?

> step one is always to uninstall PulseAudio

Doing so really is a disservice to both PulseAudio and to Ubuntu, because it bugs in ALSA and in PA remain latent. That isn't a good thing. At this point, helping test daily-live desktop images of Ubuntu Lucid is really the direction one needs to pursue. If one were to remain with Karmic, please use PA from ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev instead, as it has all the necessary fixes from the stable-queue branch.

> direct me to the information required to make Ubuntu run well and stable,
> with a low latency kernel, and an external Pro-Audio sound card, without
> PulseAudio conflicting with Jack

If you wish to remain in the Ubuntu derivatives tree, it looks like Ubuntu Studio 10.04/Lucid is more aligned with your goals. You'll want to use an -rt kernel (at the very least -preempt, which is only available on amd64 currently). Unfortunately neither PA nor JACK have fully integrated handoffs via dbus (due to missing architectural decisions on both parts), so a conflict-free PA/JACK experience is still some time away.

> Again, dismissive, and not the path to take, especially for the new guy.
> FIX THE SOUND! DUMP pulse! I've found that your own community has done
> what, you Cannoncial has not, UPDATED the ALSA drivers to CURRENT version
> to solve the problems with the prevalent "HDA" chipsets. GET THIS DONE.

Full disclosure: I am not a Canonical employee, but I spend a non-trivial amount of time maintaining audio in Ubuntu.

Because Ubuntu is heavily based on GNOME, and because GNOME has integrated PulseAudio quite tightly, removing PulseAudio from Ubuntu would be rather disastrous. Your argument has been heavily rehashed. Instead, desktop audio has already gained momentum in the PulseAudio direction, and it makes far more sense to help fix the bugs (which aren't even necessarily caused by PA -- see the libxml misuse debacles).

WRT updated drivers, it has been done: see what ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev offers in terms of linux-alsa-driver-modules-$(uname -r). Note that it is available for both Karmic and Lucid, and it is not from the official release tarball (currently 1.0.22.1) but from daily builds of git master HEAD corresponding to sound-2.6 (stable). Whatever's currently in the tree is rolled everyday.

No, they aren't the same people. And please, let's stop beating this silly dead PA horse already. It's in upstream GNOME; a decision was made to follow upstream.

With very few exceptions, Kubuntu developers are volunteers and have the unenviable task of setting QA vice feature development priorities given their resource constraints. One way to encourage Kubuntu developers is to become one, and in that respect you, too, would contribute to fixing existing bugs instead of putting in new features.

Sounds like a great blueprint to be written.

As others have stated, the recommended upgrade path for non-LTS Ubuntu versions is through each successive release.

For Kubuntu only, you can upgrade to 9.10 from 8.04 LTS or from 9.04.

By default, 8.04's PulseAudio configuration uses a "nicer" but more resource-intensive resampler. Many people have simply turned off/deinstalled PulseAudio without really understanding the culprit.

By default, 8.10's PulseAudio configuration uses a less resource-intensive resampler (at the cost of some "quality"), so you shouldn't see the regression that you did from 7.10 -> 8.04.

Actually, it's more likely to result in retail-iation as people flock to buy even more devices :) However, I don't think the hardware is where Sony makes its money - it's in the games and the yet-again-released $30 movies.

I have a collection of 3-400 DVDs, and I don't want to pay again for the same content in a different format at a lower resolution. It's bad enough I will probably do so when the High-Def battle has been won by someone..