After some mucking around I discovered the secret ingredient to getting xlinrad to compile to a functioning program. The 32 bit libasound development files must be manually installed from a 386 Fedora distribution. If this is missing, xlinrad will compile WITHOUT FATAL ERROR MESSAGES into a program that almost works but stops taking input after a while.
FYI the IDT sound chips on some ECS motherboards can actually sample at 192kHz --really-- and can receive wwvb at 60 kHz
Unlike Audigy which pretends to sample at 192 but doesn't.