What is ALSA, and why is it hanging?

[Brillig]

Hi there. I have a thinkpad r31 with a Ralink 2500 b/g wireless. Last night, I lost connection and couldn't get it back. I restarted the machine, and it hung on ALSA when rebooting (several times). I rebooted in XP and googled ALSA. It seems to be for system audio. How do the two interact, and what should I do?

[eMuNiX]

Re: What is ALSA, and why is it hanging?

Alsa is indeed the sound system, though I am not sure why it is hanging. Perhaps it doesn’t like the configuration that it has for your sound card. You could go into a command line and run alsaconf, which should detect your card and start it correctly in the future.