A few weeks ago I Installed Xubuntu on a laptop drive from a desktop via the USB port. I then ported the drive to my Omnibook 800ct laptop and was able to boot with all but the sound card configured. This is my first try at a Debian distro so some of the tools I was used to in my Mandrake experience don't exist. So far I haven't figured out the sound card.

Xubuntu, lspci, etc., does not "see" the sound card at all. Xmms reports, naturally, the sound card is misconfigured. This laptop has an on-board ES1888 type chip that was configured as an SB card in a previous Mandrake install. The relevant lines for my card in /etc/modules.conf were:

# Alsa portion
options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-es1688
options snd-card-es1688 snd_port=0x220 snd_dma8_size=32 snd_dma8=1 snd_irq=5

# OSS portion
alias snd-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

What are the equivalent settings in Xubuntu?

Also, would it have been better, for configuration sake, to attempt an install driectly from the hard drive with it in the OB800, rather than on a foreign machine? In my case I did it the quick and dirty way because this OB800 does not have a CDrom and there's no way to boot from anything other than the external floppy or the installed hd because the BIOS hasn't been updated in 8 years or so. In fact it's not even supposed to be able to use a drive bigger than 8gb.