Everytime when I boot into Fedora Core 3 (non-root) I get no sound. When I play XMMS I get no sound, even though XMMS is happily playing along (can see the graphical equalizer moving).

I fix this by loading up Redhat menu | System Systems | Soundcard Detection.

As soon as I hit "Play Test Sound", XMMS starts comings alive with sound from all ages!

But still it's quite annoying having to go through this annoying procedure just to get sound started up. Plus, the "Play Test Sound" hangs for a wee while before it eventually plays the test sound. Could my sound driver be overloaded on bootup?

Sound on linux sux for (for now)
but I have a kick ass solution.

you gotta go to the alsa web site and get the
alsa driver
alsa lib
alsa utilities

start with lib ( I think) or diriver, it will error if you do the wrong one first.

and do

and do it in each of the alsa folders

next go into your controll center and under sound and multimedia go to sound
click on the hardware tab and choose alsa
next open up kmix under sound & Video
make sure the outputs arent muted and that the PCM is at 75% also lower your master down to around the same area.
Alsa will shut off the connection to your sound device if the output is to high.

Next go into your home directory and make sure you have "view hidden files" turned on
open up .bash_profile in kwrite
and add to the bottom of the file . . .

once in a blue moon my sound will just turn off for no good reason, to resolve this I made a alsasound bash script to restart it.
create a file in the /bin called alsarestart
add this to the file . . .

Save it and change permissions to execute

then if your sound systems give you crap, open a super user terminal and type alsarestart

it's not just updating the kernel, but updating to latest kde everything fixed this bug