OK, I had a perfectly working Fedora 8 system with working sound, including an ALSA update using mercurial that got around the RealPlayer 11 audio bug. Then,

1. I installed ksensors, and that resulted in a loss of sound and a mess of my K-menu (loss of all the system configuration applet links, e.g.)
2. Doing a yum remove ksensors restored my KDE menu as before, but no sound.
3. Running the gnome soundcard config, the soundcard is identified (snd-intel-hda onboard audio) but no chords in the soundcard config app. I don't get any error messages, just no sound.

I do have alsa-pulseaudio-plugins removed.

All the inputs are turned up in Kmix and alsamixer show a bunch of inputs and they are all turned up, not muted. I'm currently befuddled. There must be a very simple issue I'm missing.

Any ideas?

Cheers.

OK,

I don't know why this works, but..

1. I removed the RealPlayerGold11 plugin (rpm -e RealPlayer)
2. I removed alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
3. I re-compiled and re-installed alsa drivers from alsa-project.org using mercurial
4. I rebooted.

After reboot, sound was extremely choppy but audible. Arrrrrrrrgh.

In KDE control center...Sound and Multimedia...Sound System...Hardware, I selected OSS as the audio device and applied it (it doesn't work), then selected ALSA and applied that. Voila! Sound returns! After the return of sound I re-enabled Autodetect in the audio device select. All is (I hope) back to normal.

Something about the installation of ksensors broke my ALSA sound and I essentially had to go back to scratch.

Cheers.