I would be glad to help.  All I can do is try to recall my steps.

1.  I had been using Core 4.  It had a slow memory leak problem.  I skipped Core 5 and downloaded the six .iso files that made up Core 6.
2.  I burned the .iso CD's, tested each one of them, and booted from them.
3.  All went fine until I tried to listen to NPR.  Nothing!!  kudzu found and correctly identified my SoundBlaster Live card, but the "sound" system could not find it.  Each time I booted a GUI appeared telling me about this.
4.  I found no mention of alsa and had no alsa module.  I figured that I had to return to 4Front Technologies "Open Sound System" (oss).  This system must be compiled into the kernel.  When I tried to oss-install, it claimed that it could not find the necessary kernel source files.
5.  I wasted a bunch of time and energy trying to learn how that system had changed from the older Cores.
6.  Finally I remembered that I had used ALSA with Core 4.  The string "alsa" was not part of the 'official' Fedora CORE 6 package. "yum" had no idea what I was talking about.  (I checked Core 4 rpm's and there it was.) 
7.  Somewhere I read in a technical chat to get the atrpms.net version of ALSA and install it.  SUCCESS! Sound!

Thank you all for your interest.

Ken Jones


On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 08:17:33PM -0500, ken jones wrote:

> Why was this so difficult?  What is it that I do not understand about 
> the Fedora packages?  Some folks told me that ALSA was part of Core 6.  
> I was using ALSA with Core 4.
  

ALSA is a part of every Fedora Core release.  It isn't packaged 
separately--it is part of the standard Fedora Core kernel package.  It 
should "Just Work".  Since it didn't just work, would you mind helping 
us out to figure out why?