Mother board: Intel 915 GEV
Processor: Genuine Intel 3 GHz EM64T enabled.
OS - WinXP SP2, SuSE 10.1 x86_64, dual boot
On Board Sound card: Intel HDA ICH6 family, Codec: ALC 860
Desktop Environment: GNOME (is KDE better??)

nothing in modprobe.conf that resembles a sound driver

lsmod | grep snd yields nuthin

/dev/sequencer does not exist.

YaST > hardware > sound - recognises the model but fails to intall it and gives the following error:

The kernel module for snd-hda-intel for sound support could not be loaded. This can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.

Manually Installing the card from the list gives the same error.

Installed ALSA version - 1.0.11rc2 (bundled in SuSE 10.1)

alsaconf doesn't locate any soundcard, legacy or otherwise.

As recommended in various places, installing alsa-driver-1.0.11 from people.redhat.com/stransky/alsa/ gives a compilation error... something like this bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2267

'make' fails in the above process.

Going backwards... ALSA driver 1.0.9 fails during make... sez there's an error in pci.h

alsa-driver-1.0.12 has been released for RedHat/FC3 to 5. Can i find it anywhere for SuSE? I guess it can resolve my problem.

Other threads haven't helped a bit. Also there is nothin in asound dir... it doesnot exist.

output of lspci yields pci devices, the sound device is listed as:
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03)

I hope i have included every info that a reply may require....
Everywhere, people were able to install soundcard using alsaconf, but here, alsaconf doesn't detect *anything*.

any ideas that a newbie can use?

When Suse is booting up you have to add the command (no acpi). I think you press one of the F keys to put the command in. It should work, if it does, I'll tell you how to make it permanent.

I installed Kubuntu... everything is okay now... Didnt expect that from SuSE tho... all the pci cards' files were missing when i checked them out. re-installed them, redid everything, nothin worked...

Thankx anyway

Suse is EXCELLENT! I'm 99% satisfied with it! Sure, it has a few minor bugs that need to be ironed out...So what, they all do. Usually the problems occur because the person who did the installation did something wrong, or doesn't know that much about Linux/configuring. Good Luck

I agree that I may have gone wrong somewhere... but i retraced every step of mine... when i installed the source, the source directory's sound dir didnt have any folder for pci cards, i even tweaked the kernel and saw there that snd-hda-intel would be loaded as a module... but it didnt.

I'd be glad if u could please clarify the reason behind this error, this would not only help me the next time around, but also the users having similar error. Also, please mention the steps during installation that may have caused this error.

Why switching to Kubuntu:
they have released their LTS (Long Time Support) which clearly mentions that it is a polished version which has been thoroughly tested. I guess SuSE didnt do the testing part nicely.

Regards,
Dev