I've just upgrade to an Athlon 64 using the Asus K8N-E Deluxe motherboard. It has build in sound (ALC850 I think) that behaves very strange. I run Fedora Core 2. I use xmms to play music (really the only application I run that needs sound). Music won't play until I run the soundcard detection thing that comes with Fedora (after each boot). Sometimes sound will just stop (always at the end of a song!) and I need to run the soundcard detection thing to get it to work again. Here is the info from the soundcard detection thing:

Vendor: Unknown vendor
Model: Generic snd-intel-8x0 device
Modules : snd-intel8x0

In order for sound to work, I need to hit the Play test sound button and wait for the sound to play - sometimes it takes 1 sec, sometimes 30. Anyone got an idea for me?

sometimes the gui tools don't work properly, try this. from a terminal alsaconf, configure the card, then

alsamixer, unmute and set default volumes, then

alsactl store, to save settings across a reboot. for further investigation, right after reboot, before running the soundcofig utility what does lsmod return? hope this helps.
good luck.

Where is alsaconf normally stored? My path is messed for some reason (Fedora 2 apparently doesn't set any normal sort of path) so I need to find it manually. On a side note, what is the command to search in a terminal? For some reason, the KDE Find Files dialog doesn't work at all.

my apologies, try issuing alsaconf as root or su -. side note, you can search from a terminal w/ find, locate, or slocate. man find, man sloacte for more details, it can be involved. again sorry, good luck.