Switching to ALSA on Potato 2.2r4

[Debian User <flonesaw@longship.net>]

I need assistance getting the ALSA sound drivers installed on Potato
- 2.2r4.

I recently switched my old SuSE 6.3 box to Debian using the 2.2r4 CD
images.  Everything is going swimmingly, with only a few, minor
issues.  On my old SuSE installation I was using the ALSA sound
drivers with my Creative/Ensoniq Audio PCI128 card (Ens 1371).  These
were compiled and installed manually.  I now want to do this on my new
Debian installation (and do it the Debian way).

Unfortunately the current state of ALSA on Stable/Potato seems to be a
total mess.  Selecting any ALSA module via DSELECT triggers mutually
unresolvable installation rules.  Worse, if you've already installed
other sound drivers on a working system, you cannot uninstall them
without triggering cascading module removal which strips out many
already hard-fought installation battles (basically anything that uses
sound).

Regardless, I intend to put ALSA on my system this week -- and do it
the Debian way -- _come high or hell water_.  The only problem is that
I am not a Debian expert.

I will document this so that others can benefit from my experience.
But I need somebody to assist me in getting the Debian bits correct.
I would appreciate it if somebody would volunteer to collaborate with
me on this.

My current situation is a working Debian system with sound compiled
into the kernel using standard kernel drivers.  I am running E and
Gnome on X.

   CPU/MB: PII-400 on Asus P2B-F
   Sound card: Creative/Ensoniq AudioPCI 128 (ens1371).
   Distribution: Stable/Potato 2.2r4
   Kernel: 2.2.19 compiled from source (via make-kpkg)

I have perused the debian-user mailing list and read ALSA-specific
inquiries and responses.  I'm ready to go anytime.

Thank you very much.


Regards,
Arne Flones
flonesaw@longship.net