'Twas brillig, and Craig Bourne at 16/03/11 17:57 did gyre and gimble:
Contrary to the expectations expressed by both Colin and Fernando, the rate of success in getting audio output from Fedora 14 applications without any tinkering in these first few tests (somewhat less than 20%) is, if anything, higher than I would expect based on my experience.
While you tests are interesting, I'm not really sure they are relevant to the ALSA mailing list.
This is primarily a distribution-related discussion in how things are configured and setup OOTB on a Fedora install.
It is perhaps more appropriate to that that discussion to a fedora-specific list.
If you keep me CC'ed in such discussions, I'd be happy to lent any insights I can.
In order to integrate PulseAudio properly in a distribution, many different components are configured to use PA by default. This includes e.g. Phonon on KDE, GStreamer and other audio output libraries (e.g. libao) and applications (e.g. mplayer). Many of these apps/framesworks should degrade gracefully in the event that PA is not running, but some may require specific setup to use alsa directly if the OOTB experience is designed to be a PA-based one. Depending on how much effort the distribution puts on to making PA optional will depend on your experience in this regard.
I would recommend testing your results against, e.g. Mandriva (or the Mageia alpha2) which offers a ticky box to disable PA and see how you get on. If the results are the same then I can help look at this as a more distro-agnostic issue, but if it works fine, then you obviously need to go poke Fedora.
But like I say, this discussion actually has very little to do with the upstream ALSA project.
Cheers
Col