Now for the good news: sound support is quite good. The sound card is not the best ever (it uses the AC97 chipset, which is of the ``cheap, but acceptable quality'' type), but at least it works. You'll want the above options; you don't need to supply module loading options, and you don't have to mess with ALSA or the like (which is what I was most afraid of). Just make sure you only load the module when you need it (using the kernel module loader, for example), because some part of the code doesn't like being idle; besides the problem with APM I mentioned above, I'm also seeing applications using the sound device that block until I kill them, in which case the solution is to reload the module.

If you're masochistic and actually want to mess with ALSA, it's possible. According to a mail I got from J. Waalboer jwaalboer@convolution.nl, all you need to do is to compile ALSA as follows:

./configure --with-oss=yes --with-cards=ali5451

make install

I've tried some of this ALSA stuff, and got some sucess. But since I don't know much about it, I've left it to the experts.

According to /proc/pci, the sound card is called ``Acer Laboratories Inc. M5451 PCI South Bridge Audio (rev. 1)''.

Unfortunately, this sound card has no internal MIDI sequencer. If you want to play MIDI files, you'll have to go for ``timidity'' or something likewise.