Perhaps I am missing something here but, I have searched everywhere with no luck for more information on this issue and it is really driving me crazy!
Why is chan_alsa.so missing from the distro?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Because very few servers need a console audio channel. If you want it you will have to recompile asterisk yourself. You should move this post to the Schmooze Distro forum, this is for generic installation issues.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll give that a go 
No joy!
Even when I attempt to compile Asterisk myself, when I run make menuselect, chan_alsa is not selectable.
I verified that Alsa is in fact installed and working on the box (CentOS 6.3 64-bit) that I am trying to put Asterisk on.
Maybe I will give it a go with CentOS 32-bit.
Very frustrating 
you probably need the dev package also, maybe:-
yum install alsa-lib-devel
That resolved the issue!
Thank you for your help.