Yet another example of how important it is for hardware manufacturers to give up their denial of an alternate OS and start releasing Linux drivers. In this article about some struggles with an eternal USB sound card, this gives me a great excuse to once again scream and yell at the hardware world once again. Everything considered, we still have come a long way I suppose.

External peripherals are not all that common, and external sound devices are even less so. We’re so used to having competent sound capabilities built into our systems that most of us don’t give it any thought. The Hercules GameSurround Muse Pocket USB is a unique external sound card that communicates through a USB port. It doesn’t work as well with GNU/Linux as we’d like it to, but it still may be useful if you have a need for a portable sound card.

The first question that was on our mind when we heard of the GameSurround Muse Pocket was, “Why would you need an external sound card?” After all, nearly every motherboard manufactured in the past three years has a reasonably competent onboard sound chip, and there are internal sound cards available at reasonable prices. After some reflection, we found some good reasons: [Read the rest]