Before installing the alsa-drivers note that in your kernel configuration you should have Sound Card Support (CONFIG_SOUND) enabled but nothing else in the Sound menu (with the possible exception of TV Card Mixer support. In particular you should not have OSS Sound Modules enabled as this will cause problems when loading the alsa driver modules. Because alsa drivers are kernel modules, they must be compiled with the same compiler the kernel has used. Install alsa-driver using the following commands as a template: ./configure \ --with-moddir=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/sound \ --with-kernel=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build \ --with-sequencer=yes \ --with-oss=yes \ --with-isapnp=no \ --with-cards=all && make && make install If this is the first time you have installed the alsa drivers, you will need to create the /dev entries using the script provided in the alsa-driver source tree: ./snddevices