The CMI9739 uses an AC97 interface to talk to. To use this chip,
load the intel-8x0 driver which should work for

Intel i8x0/MX440,
SiS 7012; Ali 5455
NForce Audio
AMD768/8111

chipsets which have an AC97 compatible chipset behind them.

CMI9739 also provides an OSS compatible sound driver wich works with 2.4.x kernels, as well as a utility to set the card into 2,4 or 6 speaker mode.

Note: early intel-8x0 drivers are bugged and could cause stuttering or too fast playback to occur. Make sure you're using a recent kernel or recent alsa-modules to prevent this behaviour.

i've tried all the above distros with the 9739A and it's pretty much worked on all of them. slack it didn't work out of the box and i never tried configuring it for slack cause i didn't care, but it should work fine. the downloadable driver for 9739A for linux doesn't seem to do anything at all by the way. in freebsd, i had to compile sound in to the kernel as "device pcm," didn't work any other way.

on suse 9.1 it gets detected and installed correctly and even works well....well only the first time ...but later if u play music files the sound is very feeble...however when u test it with yast2 it plays fine but then again no application seem to run it well..i cant figure out why... i have tried installation twice...but i guess i ll just have to wait for the next drivers!

The sound device is not working properly on Slackware 10. Sound works out of the box with intel8x0 driver but I cannot control the volume.
It is more or less a mystery till now.