Ensoniq/SB PCI 128 & woody

[Cristian Degli Esposti Boschi <desposti@DF.UNIBO.IT>]

Hi there,

I'm posting this message hoping that someone could help me
in taking a step forward with respect to what I found up to
now on the Internet.
I have installed a Debian Testing
(woody) on my PC and I was not able to hear a note from the
sound card - a Sound Blaster Audio PCI 128.
I cannot open the university's PC case but in several pages
I figured out that it is based on the chip Ensoniq 1371.
Sad to say that in Win 98 it works fine.
However, these are all the infos I found relevant:

- kernel 2.2.20 with loades modules 'es1371' (and
  consequently 'soundcore'). I think these are the relevant
  entries in 'lsmod':

##############################################
es1371                 27056   2
soundcore               2452   4 [es1371]
#############################################

  in 'lspci':

#############################################
00:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97]
(rev 08)
#############################################

  and in 'dmesg':

#############################################
es1371: version v0.28 time 15:51:55 Nov  4 2001
es1371: found chip, vendor id 0x1274 device id 0x1371 revision 0x08
es1371: found es1371 rev 8 at io 0xa400 irq 10
es1371: features: joystick 0x0
es1371: codec vendor TRA (0x545241) revision 35 (0x23)
es1371: codec features none
es1371: stereo enhancement: no 3D stereo enhancement
#############################################

It seems that the device is correctly identified but I'm not
able to play systems sounds, audio files or audio CDs. In KDE
the session starts with a message complaining that /dev/dsp
in busy. These are the states of the devices ('chmod-ed' to 666):

crw-rw-rw-    1 root     audio     14,   3 Nov  4 23:52 /dev/dsp
crw-rw-rw-    1 root     audio     14,   4 Nov  4 23:52 /dev/audio
crw-rw-rw-    1 root     audio     14,   6 Nov  4 23:52 /dev/sndstat

I also added 'root' and my account name to the 'audio' group.
I have installed OSS drivers (every component I hope...)
but not ALSA.

Questions:

- At first time I didn't realised that I had to include es1371 in the 
loaded modules. Now, are there other things to set apart from 'modconf'?
- It is advisable to pass to kernel 2.4.x ?

Thanks in advance for any suggestion. Cristian