Much ado about nothing
Upgraded my Fedora Core 6 boxen to the latest updates (which included a kernel update - 2.6.22.4-45.fc6) and a reboot later, voila, there was the deafening silence from an undetected soundcard. And this happened just as I was about to sit down to build another port … grr! Nothing more annoying then software failing. The errors included a severe error with gnome-volume-control:
No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found.
and mplayer errors too:
[AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: confmisc.c:848:(snd_func_card_driver) cannot find card '0' [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:3500:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such device [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: confmisc.c:397:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:3500:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such device [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: confmisc.c:1248:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:3500:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such device [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:3972:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such device [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default [AO_ALSA] Playback open error: No such device Could not open/initialize audio device -> no sound.
The initial instinct was to Google which indicated that whilst many clueless (l)users had this problem, nobody knew exactly what caused the problem. So I rolled my sleeves up for a night of tweaking, hacking and cursing. Fortunately, the problem was apparent almost immediately in modprobe.conf:
remove snd-intel8x0 { /usr/sbin/alsactl store 0 >/dev/null 2>&1 || : ; }; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove snd-intel8x0
Sigh, frakking package maintainers!! A modprobe later and I was back to enjoying music. Now, it’s time to go package some ports 
ps: Supporting end-(l)users should be mandatory for package maintainers: higher quality releases will be guaranteed almost immediately as an intended end result!