Hello all, After nearly deciding to settle for the commercial sound drivers, yet another post from this list (thanks all!) urged me to retry the ALSA drivers. I went back and again compiled the latest source after fully cleaning out my system. What made the difference this time was discovering that alsamixer does not unmute the channels simply by adjusting the volumes (one of those RTFM cases, instead of simply diving in...).
This only came about because I used amixer. What a relief! I apologize to those who were told I had done that before. Ignorance in this case was not bliss.... What was not clear from the installation directions was the need to install sound support completely as a module. I did try a kernel with sound support marked as "Y" and it later failed on card initialization. All is working now, under Gnome and everything I do with that card (so far!). My potato upgrade has been pretty nice, with only a single kink I'll throw out sometime soon. Thanks very much to all who offered help. It is greatly appreciated! Kenward Vaughan
