Alsa under Debian has me baffled

["Shawn P. Garbett" <Shawn@Garbett.org>]

Under RedHat I just had to compile the thing. Sure I could do that under 
Debian as well, but I'm trying to go the package route.

I downloaded the Alsa packages. 

I ran the command 'cd /dev; ./MAKEDEV audio'

I run alsaconf (don't know what those values from 4-128 mean that it wants)

It gets to the page, Now I'll run '/etc/init.d/alsa start'

Here's the output:

Loading driver:
Starting ALSA sound driver (version none):modprobe: Can't locate module snd
 no devfs available (even though using the kernel with devfs).
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.

What am I missing?