We probably want to make the pulse plugin for ALSA default if it is installed. To accomplish this clealy Fedora installs this config file in /etc/alsa/: http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/devel/alsa-plugins/pulse-default.conf?rev=1.2&view=auto and added this patch to read that file if it is available. That way, the PA plugin is automatically enabled if it is installed. If it is not installed the traditional behaviour is kept.||

#!/bin/sh
if test -x /usr/bin/padsp ; then
  exec /usr/bin/padsp -n "Foomedia Flush" -- therealprogram "$@"
else
  exec therealprogram "$@"
fi

This makes those applications appear much nicer (s/Foomedia Flush/RealApplicationName) in the PulseAudio volume control. Using -m for padsp might make sense too.||

 #!/bin/sh
if test -x /usr/bin/pasuspender ; then
  exec /usr/bin/pasuspender therealprogram "$@"
else
  exec therealprogram  "$@"
fi

This wil temporarily suspend PA's access to the audio devices, making it accessible for other applications. Note that PA closes the devices after 1s of idle anyway, so most of the time this script won't even be necessary, except in cases where one of these apps is started from a menu or similar where an event sound is generated when clicking on the menu item which will block the audio device for a second, i.e. possibly causing the app started not being able to open the audio device. Hence it is better to have these wrapper scripts.

Note that on some applications just using pasuspender is not sufficient. If they use "default" as ALSA audio device they still will be connected to PA. Hardcoded device strings is a big problem anyway, especially with closed source software. It's not fun.||

Flash is big pile of bugs. If libflashsupport.so is not used it will open as many PCM streams as possible (64 on PA), and then it cannot really cope with that and doesn't work anymore. And PA refuses to take any further connections as a safety feature. In effect, if you load Flash without that aforementioned plugin you basically kill audio entirely until your browser terminates and all connections Flash made to PA are closed. (yes, Flash keeps all streams open all the time, it never closes them until the browser terminates. It's an evil piece of software)||