I built my Shuttle mini computer about three months ago and I've been trouble shooting the sound ever since. As in NO sound. The mother board comes with AC97 integrated sound using a SIS 7012 audio accelerator.

I've done all the searches such as: lspci, lsmod, dmesg, /var/log/messages and here's a little bit of the info from that:

modprobe: can't locate module snd-card-0
kernel: snd: Intel ICH soundcard not found or device busy
alsa: succeeded

The modprobe: message is repeated eleven times, sometimes with card-1 instead of -0

HardDrake doesn't have anything listed under soundcard, just four unknown SIS chipsets under "other".

Under configureKDE, it lists:
Installed drivers: Type10: ALSA emulation
Card config: no sound cards
Audio devices: not enabled in config

Audio chipset is also listed as Intel 8x0.

I have AC97 sound enabled in the bios. I hope this is enough info for some of you more experienced Linux users to point me in the right direction. Thanks for any help.

Kernel support for the SiS7012 chip is only in recent kernels, mandrake-8.2 is a bit old for this chipset.

I was under the impression that if you had ALSA modules that they would work with any chipset.

Is this incorrect?

As I don't use Mandrake but Slackware I tell you what I did. Mandrake has a reputation of adapting software, so perhaps they did this with the ALSA drivers, I can't help with that, but here is the story of a well sounding Shuttle SS51G, but some problems remain. I did not use the kernel build-in sound-drivers, but downloaded from www.alsa-project.org the 0.9.0rc6 versions of driver, library and utilities. First rebuild your kernel: disable all sound-options, only the first must be enabled. (the Soundcore module). Then on the alsa-website click on soundcards|soundcards matrix
Go for Intel and click one of the subheaders e.g. i820 All 4 lead to the snd-intel8x0 module. You see for which chips this driver works, the SiS7012 is the sound-chip in the Shuttle SS51G barebone. Follow the installation rules described here and in the file INSTALL of the driver. you need the programs in utils at boot time and shutdown-time.aplay is great for testing.
alsamixer is needed to hear something....
It is distro-specific how to start and stop your sound-modules at boot and shutdown time. There are two scripts available for this, I choosed the simplest. They are mentioned in de INSTALL the driver. Hope this helps a bit.