LinuxQuestions.org - Alsa 1.01 drivers compiling fine, but amixer can't find sound card

I'm using Libranet Classic 2.7. I just updated the kernel to 2.4.24, and have done an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade (so I'm running as close to peak as I can ;) )

I recently tried to jump through the hoops to get ALSA working with my system. Specs:
Asus A7V600 (AD 1980 chipset, uses via82xx module)
XP 2500+
512 RAM

My first attempt was using the debian install packages for an old 0.9.x release of ALSA. Those didn't function at all (and differed quite a bit from a howto I was reading), so I uninstalled them. I then downloaded the stable sources for ALSA 1.01 - namely, the drivers, lib and utils tarballs. The steps I took were:
Comile soundcore module (and nothing else!) for my kernel
Made the drivers, using:
./configure --with-isapnp=no --with-sequencer=yes
make
make install
That went through smoothly, and gave me no apparent errors.
Then I went into the lib and utils directories and did the ./configure;make;make install there as well. No error messages or bad reports.

Then I executed:
modprobe snd-via82xx
modprobe snd-pcm-oss
modprobe snd-mixer-oss
modprobe snd-seq-oss

Finally, I tried to run amixer, which gave me the following:
amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such file or directory

Looks to me like I don't have the driver loaded properly. But then I looked under /proc and .....
Under /proc/asound I found everything I would have expected, including a card0 directory which appeared to have all the critical files that I would need there! Everything claimed it was the same version, everything claimed to be compiled for a 2.4.24 kernel as well.
Looking under /dev, I found that I had the following sound related entries:
dsp (rw-rw-rw)
mixer (rw-rw-rw)
sequencer (rw-rw-rw)
audio (rw-rw-rw)
audioctl (rw-rw-rw)
Running lspci also gave me:
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)

So that's all I can think of to do or try ... everything seems to be in place, but still amixer and alsamixer can't access the default sound device. Does anyone know of the simple little thing I forgot? (Obviously, at this point it's gotta be something small and stupid on my part :P)