Fedora & Sound: an excercise in frustration

[Kelly]

I noticed people discussing problems with the sound in Fedora.  I had problems 
with the sound myself, until I switched everything over to using the 
PulseAudio daemon.  There are fantastic instructions here:

http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup

and everything is in the repositories.  The only thing to note is that the 
system won't start PulseAudio by default; I fixed that by putting it in a 
startup script in my ~/.kde/Autostart folder, and I imagine Gnome has a 
similar procedure.  At any rate, if you install pulseaudio-esd-compat, then 
any program that uses ESound can use PulseAudio directly, and there are 
setups for ALSA to use PulseAudio as well (so you can pipe ALSA sources to 
the daemon and have the daemon claim exclusive control over the actual sound 
port).