I've been browsing you articles for the last couple days, and have had a great deal of sucess in finding my answers. Unfortunately I have a few problems I haven't been able to figure out.

I recently installed Fedora Core 1 on my computer. I really wanted to use Slackware or Mandrake, but I heard Fedora was good for beginners. After struggling with ALSA support for my Maudio Delta-44 I have to say it's running well.

Questions:

How do I set up the envy24control as the default mixer in gnome?

Only the analog volume section of the mixer seems to do anything. the rest seem to do nothing. Is this the best I'm going to get out of my card in linux?

Is there a good multitrack mixing/recording program for linux?

When the computer is booting up it gets to the line "Starting Sendmail" and sits for about 2 minutes before moving on. It wasn't doing this yesterday. What do you think I broke?

Silly questions:

Which is better gnome or KDE?

I've noticed screenshots of people with some intresting desktop enhancements. Like status monitors for CPU usage and RAM in their toolbars. I was hated things like that in windows, but I still can't help wanting to know how to do it.

Thanks to anyone who answers these questions, and I can provid more detail if you need.

Feel free to yell at me if I'm missing somthing obvious. I have a tendancy to skim instructions.

Good to hearAlso good to hear, I'd take the 'opinions' expressed towards any distro with a grain of salt. They may seem that way to one user, while another really finds one of the "harder" distros easier to understand...


Excellent
Hopefully someone else will chime in here, because I have no idea what you are talking about unless you mean how do you setup ALSA's mixer to be controlled via the Gnome Mixer, and the short answer is you can't. However, there are several alternatives that do control alsamixer via a gui, and several that are able to work in the Gnome environment.
Could be. I'm not too familiar with the card you speak of, but you may find other drivers, such as the OSS drivers, or possibly an alterntive kernel driver to work better than ALSA for you, I have had that happen once or twice with different cards...
I'd say to look into Audacity. Other options always include hitting up http://freshmeat.net and of course http://sf.net and do a bit of searching for "recording" or other keywords.

Quote:

When the computer is booting up it gets to the line "Starting Sendmail" and sits for about 2 minutes before moving on. It wasn't doing this yesterday. What do you think I broke?

Could be a number of things. You will probably want to check your syslog (probably located at /var/log/messages) to see if it gives you information on the failure or problem. It could also be that your system is wanting to send email that is large, you can always disable sendmail if that is something you are not using, it's actually a good idea if you aren't using it to not have it installed until you choose to (and on a personal note, I'd say go for postfix once you do decide to use a mail server).No such thing, but there are silly smilies over there
The age old question, similar to "Ford or Chevy" "Pancakes or Waffles" "Hot Dogs or Hamburgers"... You choose.
http://gkrellm.net
http://superkaramba.org (.net .com ? Check http://freshmeat.net )
Both are similar to your description. GkrellM is one of the greatest tools I've ever found, I am very happy to have come across it, and will always have it on my desktop(s).

Cool