sound on dell inspiron 5100, Intel 82801DB AC'97 Audio

[markus uhlmann <markus.uhlmann@ciemat.es>]

hi.

i am having trouble getting the sound to work on a dell inspiron 5100
laptop. i am running debian 'sarge' and a 2.4.18 kernel. 'lspci' tells
me (amongst other things):

  00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB AC'97 Audio (rev 02)
	  Subsystem: Dell Computer Corporation: Unknown device 0149
	  Interrupt: pin B routed to IRQ 10

using a kernel with audio support, i get the following message at boot
time (from 'dmesg'):

  Intel 810 + AC97 Audio, version 0.21, 20:42:12 Apr  9 2003

as relevant devices i got the following:

  crw-rw----    1 root     audio     14,   3 Apr  9 22:30 /dev/dsp
  crw-rw----    1 root     audio     14,   4 Apr  9 22:30 /dev/audio

however, when i try playing any soundfile (e.g. 
'cat train.wav > /dev/audio' or 'play train.wav') as root or user
being part of the audio group, i get an error like:

  /dev/audio: no such device

what's going wrong? could it have to do with shared interrupts? am i
missing something? 

i should add that i have the same problem when using a kernel without
built-in sound and loading modules by hand. 'alsa' did not do any good
either. 

thanks in advance,

markus