Pieces are falling in place. I'm able to watch DVDs here, and they have working surround sound. The bad part is that if you downsample to stereo (and that's what I do, because my cheap-ass soundcard is connected to the receiver using a simple stereo cable), the thing currently drops unused channels. This means that my beautiful 5.1 DVD is downsamples to 2.0 by dropping the surround and bass, which is not_cool[tm], because you miss half of the audio. I guess I'll need to write a channel mixer sometime soon. Does anyone have papers on how that should be done (e.g. 5.1 to 2.0; 2.0 to 5.1; 4.1 to 5.0; etc.)? How should I balance front/rear? How to balance stereo/center? How to balance bass into the other channels? Etc.
GNOME-nl
Given the success of GNOME-es, we decided we could do that as well, so we, dutch GNOME users and developers, have set up GNOME-nl. We're intending to have a lot of fun together, and maybe some of us will even be present at a Novell conference in the Netherlands early december to demo the GNOME desktop.