My desktop is 6 years old. I downloaded both Mandrake and Suse 8.2 evaluation. Under normal install, Mandrake installed the way I wanted but just like you the sound would not cut on. Suse 8.2 ran off CD and found every device connected.... so I wrote the modules it found for future reference.

Other than the USB printer, that was the second biggest pisser. Motivated by a destroyed windows 2000 CD, I searched google for very helpful hints. Turned out ALSA sound drivers were installed but since I downloaded OSS/open source, it corrupted my modules.conf file. This in turn made 'sndconfig' choose an off-the-wall driver. With that speciali post, I had to manually reconstruct the modules.conf to launch the correct driver when probing. This finally worked and I am happy. Even voodoo3 Glide worked off first chance. Now I can do some productive work on this machine. USB printer stalls from time-to-time however, on the notebook with XP, the pages shoot out like I was in an industrial printing plant. The desktop is a MMX beast. Strange thing about this, the desktop is 233mmz and the notebook is p3 1ghz. I spend 85% on the desktop now. I'm happy...Linux keeps you on your toes. Fluxbox and Icewm are my desktop choises... a tad faster.