ALSA on 2.6

[Tom Allison <tallison@tacocat.net>]

How to I check if ALSA is actually working on my system?

I have sound, but things like mplayer say that alsa can't be found.
xine works fine, but I can't find anything in the xine menus to tell me 
what it's using for sound.

Eventually I want to set up a TV card, but I need to go back and check 
off the basics.  It looks like a lot of things did not get set up the 
way I had expected.

I made an assumption that kernel 2.6 provided alsa without additional 
configuration other than loading the hardware drivers.