...and I have it set up as a media server in my living room!!

My brother-in-law decided that his old computer was starting to run too slow and went out and bought a new one. He asked me if I wanted this old one. Of course, being the geek I am, I said yes.

To my surprise, this box turned out to be only 2 years old. The reason it was running slow was the amount of cat fur/dust bunnies living inside and clogging all the heat sinks. I asked him if he had ever vacuumed it out and he said he never opens his computers to clean them.

So I cleaned it out and it runs perfectly fine.

It is an Intel quad core with 4 GB RAM, 500GB HDD, a wireless network card that downloads faster than my wired box, a high-end sound card (that he could never get running under Windows, but works flawlessly OOTB with Lucid) and a nice nVidia graphics card. Everything works wonderfully on my 46" LCD.

However, I have had to remove Pulse because it would not recognize the audio card properly. It did correctly find the analog 7.1 outs, but the digital out was only 2 channel. While I could set VLC to play with ALSA and 5.1 digital, I wanted to have everything come out of all 5.1 speakers of my home theatre receiver for every application. The only downside to removing Pulse is I can only have one app with sound at a time.

Is there any way of getting ALSA to play more than one app's sound at a time? My wife likes to play a couple of video games while listening to music (so do I) and the sound from both is usually on.

Or are there any configuration tools for Pulse (if I decide to reinstall it) that allow choosing which system-wide sound drivers I want...kind of like the way it used to be in Hardy?