alsa snd module

[Curtis Farnham <curtisfarnham@yahoo.com>]

I've "converted" from Windows 98 to Linux 16 months ago, and to Debian about 8 months ago.  I've been quite pleased with Debian.  However, I have never been able to get my sound card to work with this distribution.  I have tried 2 or 3 times, and each time have been sadly frustrated.

I just tried _again_.  This time, I installed ALSA 0.5 and all the relevant-looking packages from the Debian Testing package list using APT (previous times I've compiled and installed from source), but had the same errors as the last times.  Whenever I or alsaconf give an "/etc/init.d/alsa start" command, I am faced with the following message:

     Starting ALSA sound driver (version none):modprobe: Can't locate module snd
      failed.

When I run alsaconf, it gives the following additional messages after the above one:

     Setting the PCM volume to 100% and the Master output volume to 50%
     The ALSA sound driver was not detected in this system.
     Could not initialize the mixer, the card was probably
     not detected correctly.

I can't find a "snd" module anywhere on my system (though I'm far from a Linux or Debian expert).  I've tried HOWTO's, various search engines, and mailing list archives, in search of a remedy, but to no avail.

I am running Woody on an i586 box and with the 2.4.14 kernel (installed the proper pre-compiled flavor via APT).  My sound card is als4000.  My /etc/alsa/modutils/0.5 file looks like this:

     # --- ALSACONF verion 0.4.3b ---
     alias char-major-116 snd
     alias snd-card-0 snd-card-als100
     alias char-major-14 soundcore
     alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
     alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
     alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
     alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
     alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
     alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
     options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1 snd_device_mode=0660 snd_device_gid=29 snd_device_uid=0
     options snd-card-als100 snd_index=0 snd_id=CARD_0

This may be unrelated, but it seems alsaconf can't figure out what version of ALSA I have installed.  (See the error messages at the top of this email.)  Also, when running alsaconf, I'm not sure which sound card to use.  ALS4000 isn't listed, but there _is_ an ALS100, which I decided to try.  I don't know if this is OK, and can't find the answer on the web.  I suspect it's somehow compatible with SoundBlaster, but I don't know which one to select.

Can anyone help?????
-Curtis