Ok, I managed to finally get my winmodem to work.

MY soundcard however did not work. (It's on-board a intel 815E AC97)
I tried installing the ALSA sound drivers, followed all the instructions as far as I could.
When it got to the editing of the /etc/modules.conf
I got stuck here so I stopped.
rebooted into my root account and low and behold my sound works.
I then thought I would test it in my shell account and no such luck.

if anyone has got their sound working who has onboard sound like me. could they contact me via ICQ 109528233 or MSN nzsgc_robert@hotmail.com

Or even post here. I think if you could post step by step instructions it might help me. Sorry about the request but this is REALLY puzzleling me. as this is the last thing I need to get going before I start using Linux Mandrake 8.0 as my standard Operating System instead of Windows ME.

Sometimes you can get sound to work for others by running this command:
chmod 666 /dev/audio* /dev/mixer* /dev/dsp*.

I got my sound to work by typing in : chmod 666 /dev/audio* as root. Same for /dev/dsp* , /dev/sequencer*, /dev/mixer* the sound should work.

Can I ask you how you got your winmodem to work, I've been to the site that everyone refers to but I can't seem to understand it correctly so can you kinda instruct me as to the steps that you took to get your modem to work. thanks it would be a great help!!

not all winmodems will work under linux. only a very few are supported so far - the chances are that you'll simply have to get a new modem. if nothing on linmodems works, then you're pretty much out of luck in that respect.

I don't know what sort of winmodem you ghave but if you have a Lucent (LT) modem like mtself you could go to this site here http://www.physcip.uni-stuttgart.de/heby/ltmodem/

and download one of the files there depending on what you need.
I didn't need the support for multiple modems so decided to get 6.00a.

Hope this helps.