I have an Aureal Vortex Soundcard and Mandrake 9.1, which comes with ALSA already installed. The Aureal Soundcard isn't supported natively by ALSA, but someone has written a patch which should make the soundcard work. So I downloaded the patch, but now I have no idea what to do with it. I did a couple of searches and haven't figured it out still. I know that there's a program called patch that I should probably be using, but I'm not really sure if the patch should be applied to the kernel or to ALSA. Or is ALSA already part of the kernel? Anyways, here's a link to the page where I got the patch from. Not much documentation to help me, but maybe some can find something I missed, or clue me in to something obvious that I should have figured out already. Also, I'm not sure if I need to download drivers in addition to this patch.

AU8820 Patch
Open Vortex Project

The "download" link asks you to download a file (for me) called "download.php". This is a bzip2 archive containing a diff file.
If you want it to have a reasonable name, do:"mv download.php alsa_patch_au8820.diff.bz2".
To read the patch you could do: "bzcat alsa_patch_au8820.diff.bz2 | less". Notice the first three lines:
Here he diffs the old file "alsa-driver-0.9.2_orig/acinclude.m4" with the new file "alsa-driver-0.9.2_vortex/acinclude.m4". Since the dir is alsa-driver-0.9.2_vortex, I believe you need a source package (tarball) called something like alsa-driver-0.9.2*.tar.gz.

Unpack that tarball, which should give you a directory called something like alsa-driver-0.9.2, then run "bzcat alsa_patch_au8820.diff.bz2 | patch --dry-run ./alsa-driver-0.9.2" to test (option --dry-run) if that will work. If it does, you can remove "--dry-run", else you'll possibly have to tweak the -p options (man patch).

HTH

Thanks, I'll try that.

P.S. I'm actually starting to understand some of the replies to my questions now!