What
could be wrong? Well, I can imagine some thing...
The first is not having FluidSynth's development packages installed at the time that you build the fork. As mentioned in the release notes, if that is unavailable then the fork will be built without soundfont support. You should be able tell from the ./configure output whether building in FluidSynth support is succcessful.
This fork adds entries to what would go in dosbox.conf, so I recommend removing (or renaming) your ~/.dosbox directory before launching it. That will allow it to write a ~/.dosbox/dosbox-SVN.conf with the appropriate defaults.
At that point, your default, program-written ~/.dosbox/dosbox-SVN.conf should contain many comments about FluidSynth support. If it doesn't, then soundfont support was not compiled in, and you need to build it again.
On my Slackware system (which uses ALSA and not Pulseaudio), the file I use to launch Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers has the following:
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[midi]
mididevice=fluidsynth
fluid.driver=alsa
fluid.soundfont=/storage/Downloads/soundfonts/Scc1t2.sf2
I'd imagine that fluid.soundfont should probably be an absolute path, starting with a slash and containing no tildes or environment variables. I would also imagine that if you're on a system that uses Pulseaudio, then fluid.driver should be set to pulseaudio.
And, of course, the game must be set to use General MIDI. The volume of the game's BGM might need to be turned up in-game, and you can check the volume by switching it to, say, SoundBlaster support. Then, when you've confirmed that it works with SoundBlaster support, can switch back to General MIDI in the game and FluidSynth support in DosBox. I hate to mention this, but it does come under the "what could be wrong" umbrella.
A problem with the soundfont itself is unlikely, but you can check by using FluidSynth to play a MIDI file with that soundfont.
Finally, you should be aware that the patch I used to get soundfont support is this one:
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=27831&start=20#p385413Soundfont support does work for me, and I was just using it today.
If you still need more, then knowing your Linux distribution, the game you're trying to play and the soundfont you want to use with it would give me a better picture.