No worries, that's what we're here for, to alleviate the confusion

Recompiling your kernel means to get the new source from www.kernel.org Which source? Well that's up to you, it's your system, and it's for you to decide how stable you want to go. 2.4.20 is the current most stable kernel, however the 2.5.x series does come with the ALSA patches already applied. You take your pick, but my suggestion is the 2.4.20

From there, you normally download kernel sources into /usr/src then you untar them:
tar xvzf kernel-version
and enter the directory that is created:
cd kernel-version
Then you have 3 choices, if you want to go ultra hard corps, use make config, if you are a little more apprehensive, go make menuconfig (requires ncurses) if you are an X kinda guy/girl go into the directory while in X and make xconfig.

From there follow one of the thousands of tutorials/threads on compiling a kernel. Main thing you want to watch for is compiling soundcore as module. As for your specific driver (the via_82xx) you can compile that into the kernel or module as was mentioned above. At that point you can (hopefully) simply do a modprobe for your audio module: modprobe via_82xx OR you can compile ALSA (watch for errors from the ALSA programs) against your existing kernel. How? Well you will need to symlink your existing kernel version to /usr/src/linux

Say what?
Well if you downloaded linux-2.4.20 then you would symlink /usr/src/linux to /usr/src/linux-2.4.20 (*The directory, not the tar.gz file) like so:
ln -sf /usr/src/linux-2.4.20 /usr/src/linux

Then compile your ALSA drivers according to the page over at ALSA's website.

HTH

Cool

drivers/built-in.o: In function `elp_sense':
drivers/built-in.o(.init.text+0x8f66): undefined reference to `save_flags'
drivers/built-in.o(.init.text+0x8f6b): undefined reference to `sti'
drivers/built-in.o(.init.text+0x8fb0): undefined reference to `restore_flags'
drivers/built-in.o(.init.text+0x8ff3): undefined reference to `restore_flags'

make: *** [.tmp_vmlinux1] Error 1

I get this error while doing make zImage and bzImage
why ?
It never creates the file

need help i'm new to linux

did try to modprobe via82cxxx_audio and ac97_codec on KDE the sound card [Apollo Super AC97/Audio] onboard worked. Then few min after finished the mp3/avi played then there is no sound. Then i restart; continue the same matter it's work ok. What should i do?

I do understand that i can use
cd /usr/src/linux
make xconfig
to select VIA VT82C686

then make bzdisk.
what happen is i cannot change my ip address.

i need sound anyway.. please help guide me step by step