i am in the same boat. red hat fails to properly use my C-Media soundcard. some sounds play, some other sounds wait till some other apps exit, then play, some sounds don't play at all. the C-Media card is supported by alsa, which red hat does not include.
Any help (of a non totally confusing nature) on how to install alsa properly in red hat please?
the alsa site has really confusing (to me) instructions.
thanks....
PS yes, i did cat /dev/urandom to the /dev/dsp device and it worked. not only that but my konsole console beep works too.
i just tried using xmms, the esound plugin works, the arts plugin works, the OSS plugin works, and having installed a few rpms of alsa using apt-get for red hat i tried the alsa plugin too, it does not work.
the alsa plugin says 'error opening alsa device: no such file or directory'. fine, you might say, use esound, oss or arts, but no. some apps do not deliver their sounds okay, kde does not play a sound when it starts up for example, some games and swf files are silent and a particularly annoying thing is that i cannot play audio CDs using any player at all. and i know the hardware is set up fine because mandrake (which uses alsa by default) plays cds fine (or it did when it was installed on this machine).