Help with sound on Fc16

[stan]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:05:26 -0700
don fisher <hdf3 at comcast.net> wrote:

> I am trying to find documentation on the alsa/pulse audio system. My 
> goal is to set it up independent of gnome or KDE.

This is the default configuration for Fedora out of the box.
 
> If I run KDE the sound works. If I run twm or equivalent, it does
> not. Why is the sound configuration buried in the window manager?

It isn't.  Go to a console, Ctl-LeftAlt-F2, and type aplay <some wav>.
You should hear sound.  Gnome and KDE provide an extra layer of
abstraction on top of pulseaudio, but that shouldn't affect your
ability to use sound outside of them.  If you have a standard install,
LeftAlt-F1 should get you back to the gui.  If not, try LeftAlt-F7.  I
use mplayer to play music through pulse at consoles all the time.
Audacious should do the same in any window manager (it's worked in
every wm I've tried).

> What do I have to do to implement the same function that KDE provides?

Do you have alsa-plugins-pulseaudio installed?  It sets up the system
so that things that are sent to alsa are routed through pulseaudio, and
is the default on Fedora. If it is, and sound doesn't work, adding your
user to the audio group should work. Note that pulse only allows a
single user to have sound at any time unless it is run as a daemon
(last I checked).