Fedora Core 9 ( FC9 ) with C-Media CMI8738 PCI sound card.
Asus board, AMD cpu, home-built machine.
Things that use /dev/dsp work (sound out and microphone).
Pulse audio did not work at all, pulse audio is (I believe) entirely
removed.

I have never been able to get the system-sounds to play.
Whether using gnome-sound-properties (pressing play
on a system sound, the 'sounds' tab of
gnome-sound-properties) or live system sounds.

On the other hand -- on the devices page of gnome-sound-properties
test sounds play fine. Audacity records and plays sounds.
youtube (under firefox) plays sound with video.
Skype works using /dev/dsp . I used strace on
gnome-sound-properties and it seems to think it's successfully
applying commands to /dev/snd/controlC0 .

~/.asoundrc file with
pcm.!default front:CMI8738
was a wild stab that seemed to do nothing.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.