alsaconf detected the card without any trouble. The only next step was to increase the volume in order to get the sound out from the laptop.

I have this chip in the form of a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card, but there are other cards that use this chipset. It's a good chip, and support is improving, but it's not all the way there yet. Multi-open was added to ALSA within the last year-and-a-half, which is good, and you can now get access to all channels on the card (6 analog + some digital I believe). The problem is that each set of channels (front, rear, center/lfe, etc.) are different devices, so you can't get 4 or 6 channel sound without some work.

What it comes down to is that you need to hack up an asoundrc to combine the separate 2-channel devices into a single 6 channel device. The problem with this is that there's no mechanism to make sure that all channels are synchronized, so rear channels can lag behind front channels slightly at times (I've experienced this, and it made me doubt the feasibility of getting 6 channel sound out of this card currently), which is annoying to say the least.

The main problem is that Cirrus Logic isn't doing anything to rectify this situation. They won't write linux drivers for their card (no surprise), and also refuse to release specs so that someone can write a free driver. This means that the ALSA hackers have to guess at how stuff works, so progress is slow.

If you want good 2.1 channel sound, this is a safe bet. However, if you want multi-channel sound right now, you might want to look elsewhere.

This is the soundcard on my used HP Kayak desktop ... I had to re- run the configuration utility from root, but it finally got recognised. Works great.