One tool that would be particularly useful is a GUI sound-card configuration utility. In general, there seems to be a lack of good ones among all distributions I've seen.
I've been impressed by "alsaconf". The only prerequisite is that you use alsa modules instead of built in to the kernel.
It's pretty much a "next-->next-->finish" thing for each sound card. It is also integrated into Gentoo nicely (uses /etc/modules.d/alsasound).
And what I found most impressive, is that it got my sisters PC up and running with an ISA soundcard in about 10 seconds. I built ALSA as usual, tried to load the modules, but they did not detect any devices. Ran alsaconf, it did some probing and added a few cryptic module parameters to /etc/modules.d/alsasound which got me up and running with ISA sound.
Maybe an X-based front end would be nice though...
Daniel
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