There seems to be a lot of confusion and complications to these elements, but I found them not-too-hard to get working.

My specific components:
Slackware 10.0, running 2.4.26 as shipped
Shuttle AN35N motherboard with nforce2 Ultra 400 + MCP chipset (onboard audio and ethernet)
Radeon 9800 Pro vid card

sound: seems like everything was setup out-of-the-box. I used 'alsamixer' to unmute (press m) Master and PCM, and turned them both up to about 90%. Saved this setting with 'alsactl store', so hopefully it won't go away on reboot. Actually, later, KMix seemed to unmute everything.

network: I noticed that the forcedeth kernel module was already loaded according to 'lsmod'. After cycling with 'rmmod'/'insmod', the eth0 interface showed up in 'ifconfig'. Even after rebooting, it is working. Not sure what was going on.

X: In the default /etc/X11/xorg.conf, in the Section "Device", I changed Driver to "radeon". After that, 'startx' brought up KDE no problem. Too low of a resolution, but I'm working on that ...


Hope someone will find these tips useful

Please don't crosspost, I answered your forcedeth question here

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=219112

As far as the radeon, be sure to download the drivers and get the 3d support.

Install these drivers to get full? 3d support on your radeon card

http://mirror.ati.com/support/driver...eon-linux.html

I posted a tip in this thread on how I got the ethernet to work. My question you reference was asking why that fix works.

The 3D don't seem to be necessary to get X running well. Of course, I'll need them for Doom ...