installing linuxant (riptide) sound drivers
 

I have an old HP Pavilion computer - AMD K6-2, 350 Mhz, used to have Windows 98. So I'm hoping to get a fairly lightweight linux setup on it. No important data on it to worry about, so I have been trying several different distros (Mandrake 9.1, Knoppix live and HD install, live cd versions of Vector and SUSE 9.1, and currently Simply Mepis). I am still very much new to linux (for troubleshooting at least.... I've played around with a few different versions and have gotten kind of familiar with them).

Nothing will autodetect the soundcard on this though - that is a Rockwell International Riptide PCI Audio Controller. Riptide is apparently similar or synonymous with conexant, so I found drivers at linuxant.com (it wouldn't let me post a link here) but they only have RPM's (for FC1, RH9, Mandrake, Suse) and generic RPM and TAR packages for all other situations. When I had Mandrake 9.1 on this computer, I installed that RPM and it worked. I had some other problems with Mandrake though, and wanted to use a Debian based distro. Right now I'm using Simply Mepis and would like to either use it or something else Debian based and small, maybe DSL or Feather.

I downloaded and extracted the TAR package, but when I run 'make install' I get this message:

make[1]: Entering directory '/home/jon/Desktop/riptide-0.6lnxtbeta03122800/modules'
common.mak:11: *** Is the kernel-source package installed? KERNELSRC does not point to a proper directory (/lib/modules/2.4.26/build). Stop.

I'm not really sure if the kernel-source package is installed or how I would go about doing that though. Does that mean downloading or compiling a new or customized kernel or something else? If all else fails I guess I can go back to Mandrake but I would like to figure out how to do it with a Debian based system.

Your best bet is probably to install the kernel-headers package. To do that, you have to know what kernel you have. An easy way to do this is to type:
$ uname -r
After that, get the kernel headers package for your kernel using apt-get. Use this command:
$ apt-get install kernel-headers-2.6.8-2-386
Replace 2.6.8-2-386 with whatever your kernel version was.

Another way to get the kernel-headers is to use Synaptic. It is a front-end for apt-get.

If that doesn't work, try getting the kernel-source package. You would do that the same way, but take off -2-386 in the kernel release.

I'm knew to Debian, so I can't really give any other advice than that. Hope that helps. :)