I have a Hammerfall Lite on one of my Linux machines, with external DACs in the speakers. I regret this decision almost every day. It took MONTHS to get an alsa driver which occasionally worked; it would run out of memory, refuse to load, etc and the alsa mailing list was close to useless. I have arrived at the stage where I can play MP3 via mpg123, MIDI via Timidity, and mono files with aplay, but stereo files are rendered as silence, albeit of the same length. The OSS emulation player does play stereo usually. Mind you it breaks up badly. I have a M-Audio DiO 2496 on my mail home machine and that is simpler, and I am very happy with it (except reading digital from the DAT took 6 months of experimentation -- think I have cracked it last July; I was rebooting into W98 to read DATS). The lab machine have a Audiophile, which has not been so extensively used yet, but so far seems OK.
Of course you may manage it better than I did; YMMV etc etc. ==John ffitch
