Up to now my RH enterprise 4.3 work smoothly with my onboard sound card (sis). Now I want to replace the onboard sound card with the new Sound Blaster 24 bit sound card. However, when i installed the new card(i did disable the onboard sound chip in bios), RH enterprise can not detect it. Looking for the driver module for sound blaster live 24 bit on alsa website, i found out that the driver module(snd-ca0106) is not shipped with RH enterprise(no module with that name in /lib/modules/2.6.9-34.EL/kernel/sound/drivers). There is instruction for compiling alsa driver for linux on alsa website.However, i am not sure it is a good idea. I want to confirm some info before i make a mess in my system.
1/Is the RH EL kernel has alsa driver compiled into the kernel?
If yes, then compiling alsa from source again will conflict with the kernel driver, right?(i knew it from gentoo)
2/if i follow the driver compiling instruction on alsa website but not install the driver(just do ./configure && make) then copy the driver module(snd-ca0106.ko and its dependencies) to lib/modules/2.6.9-34.EL/kernel/sound/drivers/ and modify /etc/modprobe.conf, is it enough to make the sound card work but does not harm my kernel module structure? I did try to install alsa from source and it just delete all my kernel sound module!!!
Hope anyone can give a suggestion.
Thai