10 I have Recently configured alsa on my redhat install.
20 I ran alsamixer and un-muted chanels and raised volume.
30 I hear sound. (Cool beans).
40 I reboot my machine and........no sound.
50 I run alsamixer and..............everything is muted and volume is all at zero.
60 goto 20

This is nerve racking.
can anyone help?

I have found out what I was doing wrong.
Thanks for all the posts....

I have a similar problem. I'm running Mandrake 9.0, and using a Soundblaster Live! card. When I boot into Gnome or KDE, I have no sound available. With Gnome, I can get to a mixer and move all the sliders up (nothing's muted; just turned all the way down); while in KDE, I can't seem to find a mixer. The Gnome mixer has an option in the prefs to 'restore saved configuration on startup', but has no way to save a configuration.

I've heard that there's a script or something out there that's specifically for this problem, but I can't seem to locate it.

Any help or advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Lookup how to use "alsactl" store/restore
This is what did it for me.

Tell me if this helps...

"alsactl" is located in /usr/sbin .
you need to get your mixer/ volume settings set to your liking. Make sure you hear sound. I used alsamixer to unmute and change settings.
dont close the alsamixer terminal.
Then run alsactl store in another terminal. This saves your mixer settings.
then add "/usr/sbin/alsactl restore" to the beginning of your "/etc/bashrc"
script.

next time you restart your mixer will be at the same point that it was when you ran "alsactl store"

ps. make sure that "/usr/sbin" is in your path.

Thanks for the help, Lawful. While I don't seem to have alsactl, or much of anything else, I did find the program Gnome uses (gnome-volume-control) as a mixer and can access it in KDE through the command line. So that fixes part of my problem. I looked at the only documentation I could find, and saw that the Preferences deal about 'Restore saved settings ...' is supposed to save *and* restore the settings.

Since it's not, and I didn't see any other information on how to force it to, I'm still at a loss on making it so I don't have to keep resetting the volume sliders. Oh well. I'll figure it out sooner or later. I hope.

If you install the alsa lib and util packages you will get "alsactl" and other tools for alsa.

I also remember seeing something about alsa that was particular t mandrake. If I can find it again i will link you to it.