Gentoo Sound not working

Hello Every One!!!
I am having a bit of problem with my linux- Gentoo, I am new to this Linux environment, but i really like it, and want to keep working with it.
But the problem is that, on my linux i am using KDE 3.3 and the sound is not working, i think the sound card if not installed.
I am using IBM R50 laptop. I am really want to get the sound working and i relly want the mp3 songs also working. I have been going through Gentoo wiki-howto, but my problem is that there they said to configure/ edit the kernel files, and because perviously have been using windows do not know how do we configure/edit kernel files, like
configuring files to setup hardware.
Please can someone let me know some source from where I can learn all this, that will be great. and then I want to Install the printer also.
I also wan-to learn more about Gentoo.
Any sort of help will be appreciated.
Regards
Harbir

Is your user in the 'sound' group?

Also, did you manually configure your kernel? Or did you use genkernel?

Hello Caliginous!
I do not know, if user, is the member of the 'Sound' group, plz, let me know how should I check it, and if it is not, hen how shall i make it the 'sound' group member.

Harbir

Oops, I was wrong; it's the 'audio' group, not 'sound.'

If you didn't explicitly add your user to the 'audio' group, you probably aren't there. Login as root, and edit /etc/group. Scroll down to where it says: audio::<number>:

Right after the last colon, type your username, save and exit.

Also try to figure out what type of sound device you have and make sure you have the kernel driver compiled if it exists.

I'm using Gentoo, but my sound works fine without being a member of the 'audio' group.

harbir, what measures have you taken so far to configure sound? If the answer is 'none' or something similar, I'd recommend you check out the section of the Gentoo documentation that deals with how to install and configure ALSA:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml

If that doesn't work, post back and don't forget to mention what kind of sound card you have and any error messages returned.

-Ch4r