Onboard sound and pci sound failure, alsa no help.
 

Hiyya.
Debian Sarge, 2.4.27-2-386.

My onboard soundcard skips while playing audio files. On a previous
machine this was solved by disabling the onboard and installing a Sound
Blaster 16 (I specialise in obsolete hardware).

I acquired an SB Live! and installed it. I booted and disabled the
onboard sound in my bios. The SBL didn't work. On some advice I
installed alsa, which I had never previously used. alsaconf and lspci did
not return it. I surmised the card was faulty - it was secondhand.

I removed the SBL and enabled onboard sound, but now it doesn't work at
all. lspci lists it. alsaconf doesn't find it. Perhaps the SBL was okay
afterall and something else is the problem.

I would prefer the SBL as the onboard sound (lspci "0000:00:05.0
Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev 10")
sucks, but some sound is better than nothing.

Can anyone help with any of this?

You should be able to use the card. If you want put it back in and disable the onboard sound.
Put it in a different slot and see if it shows up with lspci.
If it doesn't show up it will not work. Try another one. There are a bunch on ebay - cheap
this card works
http://cgi.ebay.com/ESS-1370-PCI-SOU...QQcmdZViewItem

I put the card in the other slot - no return from lspci, it's cactus.

After some hard slogging through google/linux I found the module for alsa that I needed and discovered that the alsa modules for my kernel weren't installed.
#apt-get install alsa-modules-2.4-386
#alsaconf

...and it picked the right one straight off the bat and now it goes. I'll test it hard over the next few days and see if the alsa module removes the skipping problem.

God only knows what driver it was using before.

cheers,
Dave.