[LAU] tips for beginners

Hi all, I've been lurking around a few weeks now as I get my feet wet in the world of linux audio. I find it very difficult to get off the ground, to be honest. I dusted off an older PC that I had used for audio in the MS Windows environment and carved out a partition for fedora 11 with the real-time kernel from PlanetCCRMA. OS install went off without a hitch as did installing the new kernel. That's just about where "easy" stopped. I have a list of things I'd like to ask about but I think I'll just start off simple. Silly me thought I could plug speakers into the output of the 2496 and I'd be able to hear (and eventually *make*) glorious music -- no such luck. So, onto my first issue: I check what the system sees $ cat /proc/asound/cards 0 [au8810 ]: au8810 - Aureal Vortex au8810 Aureal Vortex au8810 at 0xfea80000 irq 21 1 [M2496 ]: ICE1712 - M Audio Audiophile 24/96 M Audio Audiophile 24/96 at 0xdf80, irq 22 ... so far so good Now, I just want to use the sound preferences dialog and make sure the system is using the 2496 as main output. Problem is, although both the 8810 and 2496 are present in the "Capture" tab, only the 8810 is available from the "Playback" tab. Actually _hearing_ the music aside, I decided to try my luck with JACK. Funny enough, I was able to get a rudimentary JACK infrastructure passing xmms audio over to ardour2 (was a small tutorial I found) ... still, no sound from the speakers though ;-) Could anyone here possibly help or point me to a resource that can? Thanks in advance, David