Factory soundcard installed in a 1999 HP Omnibook 900.
All I can say is that this thing has been a royal pain in the arse for me. I've had this laptop running SuSE for about 2-3 years and the sound has worked for maybe 6 months out of that (had it working once after a LOT of tinkering and work, enjoyed it, then it broke and I couldn't figure it out again). There is kernel support for it (module nm256) in 2.6, but I've had poor luck getting it to work. Google it, there are a few others who've dealt with this problem and I think some of my old posts on LQ too.
A real pain to track down some current info on this old dog, since most of the suggestions are outdated. First off, ALSA provides OSS emulation these days, and it's already included in every distro I've gotten my hands on in the last year. And you need to use the OSS drivers here. Slackware also includes a very useful tool, alsaconf, that helped automate the setup, though I had to specify for alsaconf to "probe legacy..." and "all DMA/IRQ combinations", and "modify modules.conf" to have it actually dig deep enough for the right drivers, which are apparently
Just in case, I chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa to be sure the alsa configuration would automatically run at boot, and used more from the alsautils package: alsactl store to lock in the soundcard's setttings, alsamixer to adjust volume.
Well, after figuring all that out, it was nice to finally hear music on that old Omnibook 900. Sadly, the volume doesn't crank up high enough, but the sound is pretty clear. Also, not only doesn't the OS detect the need for the right drivers automatically, but it insists on loading alternate drivers that are admittedly described as fitting, but fail to work at all: nm256_audio, snd_nm256, ad1848. Not even blacklisting these drivers kept the operating system from loading them at boot!
So, the rating is rather ambivalent, but I would have to recommend ths product because the right drivers are still available in the kernel, though they take some digging to find and load correctly.
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