To start this thread out, I have been searching and reading man pages for about three hours trying to get sound to work. A little background... I am running Sarge kernel 2.6.8 and I was trying to configure ALSA. I found tons and tons of posts with helpful suggestions, and followed all of them to a "T", My problem, specifically was this:
I ran alsaconfig, did not detect my card, I set my IRQ 5 to Legacy in my BIOS then chose to scan ISA devices... It found my sb-16, updated modules, everything worked great! I had sound. Rebooted and I got this message:
Starting ALSA... /etc/rc2.d/S20 alsa: Error: alsactl restore failed with message 'alsactl: load_state: 1134: No soundcards found...' Read all the alsa man pages and found nothing useful. So I installed discover, that didn't do anything. I checked in /etc/init.d/alsa to see if there was anything obviously not quite right... Nothing there. I moved /lib/modules/2.6.8-1-386/kernel/sound/oss to /root/oss to make absolutly sure that oss wasn't being loaded. Then I used modconf to make sure that my soundcard module was in the kernel. It was! I was feeling pretty frustrated as sound worked, but I had to run alsaconf after every reboot. I was just about ready to give up, then I opened /etc/modules in nano and added snd-sb16 to this list.
I did a reboot and the error message was gone. When I tried to open a stream with Music Player, I got a message that OSS had already been started by something else. So, I opened up my Gnome control Panel and went to sound, then unchecked start sound server at startup, did a reboot, and everthing works!
I hope this saves someone some time searching through all the sound posts, but I figured that since I got it to work, I should share my experiance.
Also I am going to be moving the oss directory back to where it should be... Shouldn't have been the problem, it was just a suggestion I read in another post.
Good Luck!