driver configuration; thank you, Debian!

[Peter Christensen <pchris@snip.net>]

First I want to thank everyone involved with Debian!  I got so used to having 
to reboot my 5-year-old Win95 computer, sometimes several times each day.  I 
was told that I should get a new computer with Windows XP.  Debian is great!  
Woody installed easily and worked from the start.  I'm using KDE because 
everything is organized in one place.  I plan to check out other software 
after getting some experience, though KDE is so nice I'll probably just stay 
with it!

My question now concerns device drivers.  I have an HP laserjet 6L and an 
"on-board" Ensoniq PCI audio chip.  Both appear to be supported under Linux, 
according to linuxprinting.org and the linux-sound how-to.  During 
installation there was a procedure, "configure device driver support," that I 
skipped through because I didn't understand what to do.   It said that 
afterward I could run "modconf" instead.  I couldn't see anything in modconf 
that seemed to relate to sound.  

I've been looking through manuals, how-tos, etc., but don't have a clear idea 
of what I need to do.  I checked dmesg, and there was no reference to the 
sound chip.  When KDE starts there is a message, "sound /dev/dsp cannot be 
opened."  

Could someone give me a rough idea of what I need to do here?  Will I need to 
recompile the kernel?

Following instructions in the sound how-to I did:
ls -l /dev/dsp

and got
crw-rw----    1 root     audio     14,   3 Mar 14 16:51 /dev/dsp

So maybe I just need to configure the kernel?  Any advice would be 
appreciated!

Thanks,
Peter Christensen