the sarge kernel is 2.6.8, as everybody knowns that's not the best alsa incarnation. if your sound is not working pick up 2.6.11 fromI had found this when I was researching ALSA. But it seemed to work at first. The problem now is that my system crashes hard when I am running only evolution (with gnome of course). I have turned the sound chip OFFon the mobo since this morning.
From personal experience, the probability over time of experiencing an incompatibility between a linux kernel and a sound card approaches one.
Welcome to the club, and upgrade your kernel to something from unstable. It's no big loss to have to move to a post 2.6.8 debian kernel for your system, and besides, newer ALSA drivers in newer kernels may solve your problem completely.
unstable. and no that certainly not an rc bug.It certainly seems RC to me. Christoph Beier reported similar hard crashes.
The RC guidlines are here: http://release.debian.org/sarge_rc_policy.txtWhile it is arguable that a hardware issue with _A_ sound card driver in the debian 2.6.8 kernel may "make unrelated software on the system (or the whole system) break" this is probably not sufficient for tinkering with the debian 2.6.8 kernel this late in the game. If you are able to track down the problem in a later kernel version, and the fix for the problem does fit some of the other RC guidelines (for instance a security hole patch), perhaps the kernel maintainers might consider integrating such a patch at some point.
Regards, Satadru