Sound check on first boot ...will never work if ALSA is muted!

[Jerone Young]

When you bootup Fedora 2 for the first time (if your
lucky) you are greeted with a nice pretty startup
screen. You configure your options until you hit the
Sound check portion to check if your sound works. The
problem here is that we are now using ALSA and
everything is muted by default. There is no way to get
to a sound mixer in this screen to unmute it. Has
anyone thought about this ?  Things like this drive
Mr. Average user or even new comers to Linux crazy.