Alsa sound question

[Joel Hammer]

I am trying to install alsa drivers for my built in
soundcard on my cheap lindows box.

     Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies,
     Inc. VT8233 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 40)

The sound works great with the modular kernel supplied by
lindows, but I burned a very slimmed down kernel (without
usb, devfs or scsi support) which works fine for most
things, except sound.

I got the alsa drivers and they compiled and loaded fine.
I have gotten all the modules to load in the reconfigured
box with insmod. Everything looked fine. I have another
lindows box and I checked to be sure I had all the same
modules loaded. I changed permissions on the devices.

I can cat an *au file to /dev/dsp, and get sound, although
it sounds fuzzy.

I can't get any sound with xmms, nada.

Looking at /dev, dsp is not being accessed. In my working
lindows installation, artsd is running and accesses
/dev/dsp during playback. artsd is running on the bad box,
too, but doesn't seem to be doing anything during playback.

The sound mixer in kde works and does change the volume
on play back of the au files.

Of perhaps some relevance, alsamixer doesn't work on the
bad box but works on the good box. It gives this error on
the bad box:

     alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such
     file or directory


Any insight appreciated,

Joel