I've spent the last couple of hours playing with PulseAudio. Wow. How is this not installed instead of ESD on Fedora and GNOME? This is a sound system done the right way. It's quick, I've not found a bug yet, and it JUST WORKS. It works on Windows, Linux and BSD and works with avahi for new network and HAL for hotplug local sound devices.
In my opinion, “rm -rf esound arts alsa-dmix” – GNOME guys, why is this not an external dependency of 2.17.x?