I am having trouble getting Alsa to recognize
an SBLive! 5.1 card. Alsaconf says "No supported
PnP or PCI card found". I suspect that may be because
I currently have sound support (emu101k) built into
the kernel. Can someone confirm this? Do I have
to recompile without kernel sound support? Does
Alsa use emu101k only if it exists as a module?

Please lighten my darkness...

Wootle.

Alsaconf uses its own sounddriver and cannot load this driver while your emu10k1 (=oss driver) is loaded or built in the kernel. So you have to choose, use alsa or use emu10k1. I use the emu10k1 driver, which works fine on my SBLive Value.
If you want to use alsa you have to recompile your kernel without the emu10k1 built in, emu10k1 as a module is fine.

I'm certainly no ALSA expert, but yup, sounds very likely that your ALSA problems are due to having the emu10k1 support built right into the kernel (which I don't really see the reason for). I say that a good rule of thumb is that when compiling a kernel, compile as much as possible as modules. So, seems like you're up for a recompilation.

I don't understand what you mean by asking if ALSA will use emu10k1 only if it exists as a module, since ALSA doesn't use emu10k1 at all. ALSAs corresponding driver would be snd-emu10k1, which of course is a module since ALSA is not a kernel feature. Unless you're using 2.6.x, that is...which I'm guessing you're not. Perhaps you should consider stating your Slackware/kernel version?

But, as I said, I'm no ALSA expert, so don't kill me if I'm wrong.

Thanks for your explanations, rottvogel & nvn,
that has clarified the situation. You are no doubt correct, nvn,
that Alsa does not use emu101k. I have been satisfied
with the kernel sound driver up till now, but then I
installed Ogle (dvd driver) under Slack 9.1 and found that at
startup it needed the alsa pcm device 'default', which is
why I was led to try and set up Alsa. The best choice as you suggest
might be to recompile emu101k as a module, then it could be
swapped out with alsa when required...

BTW I am running kernel 2.4.22 under Slack 9.1.

Thanks again for your help,
Wootle.