> I am just wondering to myself how easy/hard it would be to have the GUI of
> mudita on a different machine to which it is running. 

ssh -Y into the remote box, type mudita24/envy24control and you should have the full GUI running happily on a remote machine. My box with dual Yamaha db60 clones is like that and it works fine -- just like it's local. I use  mudita24 on the remote machine to control the Terratec DMX6fire and my hacked Dynex/db60 combo ( http://linuxaudio.org/mailarchive/lau/2010/7/3/171075 outputs Toslink back to the terratec for mixing in DMX6Fire. which outputs SPDIF to M-Audio M-66 on desktop machine for more mixing :-) )

Without remote X Window display (the whole point of X is that the GUI can be remoted to a lightweight PC and the app can run on a big burly machine) you can also do quite a bit with a remote terminal and alsamixer(1), assuming you like using your arrow keys on a keyboard instead of a mouse. Even the peak meters can be read via terminal:

> amixer -c M66 cget iface=PCM,name='Multi Track Peak',numid=45
> numid=45,iface=PCM,name='Multi Track Peak'
>   ; type=INTEGER,access=r-------,values=22,min=0,max=255,step=0
>   : values=63,62,51,49,56,60,63,62,59,54,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,113,112

( see https://mudita24.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/mudita24/README )

Finally, both mudita24 and envy24control both have the ability to be midi controlled, so you could also remote-control via http://qmidinet.sourceforge.net/qmidinet-index.html by adding the following options to the mudita24 command-line.

      -m, --midichannel
              Use  MIDI  controller  values to control the Faders in the mixer
              view.  The application will  react  to  controllers  on  channel
              midi-channel  and send controllers on this channel when the user
              moves the GUI sliders.

       -M, --midienhanced
              Use an enhanced mapping from midi controller values to db  slid-
              ers.

Alternately, had mudita24 been implemented in Qt, it would have been pretty easy to merge in the embedded-webserver and associated code I hacked to facilitate QML to application-embedded webserver interactions via JavaScript, ala http://code.google.com/p/voicetogoog/ or http://code.google.com/p/mediatator/ ...

The app w/ embedded webserver would then be controllable from any machine on the network, while interacting directly with local hardware. IMHO, more apps should have embedded webservers and/or REST services. XBMC makes quite nice use of it.

-- Niels
http:///www.nielsmayer.com

PS: also no reason to panic - there seem to be plenty of modern full-size mobos with THREE PCI slots so mudita24 has a long life ahead of it:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&Subcategory=280&Description=&Type=&N=100007627&IsNodeId=1&srchInDesc=&MinPrice=&MaxPrice=&PropertyCodeValue=706%3A94320&PropertyCodeValue=706%3A45357&PropertyCodeValue=706%3A131231&PropertyCodeValue=706%3A49183&PropertyCodeValue=706%3A53841&PropertyCodeValue=706%3A88789&PropertyCodeValue=706%3A50781&PropertyCodeValue=735%3A7582&PropertyCodeValue=735%3A7581&PropertyCodeValue=735%3A7583 (from http://www.studionu.com/uadforums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15100 ). 

PPS: Hoping to upgrade one of my PCI and Envy24 boxen to a more recent Linux so's I can get back on Tim's latest changes to mudita24 -- I'm stuck at the version that worked on the old Gtk and that'll probably motivate me to get back to working on mudita24, even though I should be working on something else. :-)