***PLEASE READ CAREFULLY, I DO NOT HAVE OSS AND ALSA MIXED UP***
I am running an EMBEDDED system that uses intel i830 chipset with built-in AC97 sound.
When the system normally boots, the sound devices are configured and present but MUTED in some way. Since I am using OSS emulation for ALSA, neither produce sound even though they appear to be working without errors. If I run "alsaconf" it unloads the modules (and lists them) and reloads them at some point and the sound works. I am trying to write a script that will reproduce the effect. OSS is unmuted after alsaconf... Why?
It uses the snd-intel8x0 module and a few others. I can unload them all with "rmmod" and load them back with "modprobe", but OSS device no longer works (gives an error) and ALSA cannot find a card. If I run alsaconf, both OSS and ALSA work again.
What does it do? I need to know how I can do this manually so I could write a script that will run on boot.
Please help guys, I am so close to completing this project!!!
Thanks in advance.
*EDIT*
To clarify, I am reading the alsaconf script myself, but unfortunately I am only a beginner programmer and it doesn't make much sense to me yet. I need help breaking this down to separate commands I can run in a console.

at this point, all i can do is commiserate. i do redhat9. it took me from the end of feb to this week to get alsa working. now all i have to do is get flash9 to stop blowing off mozilla browser. i notice that mplayer does "alsa-uninit: pcm closed" when i exit. this is certified wtf. i will follow your thread - good luck.

Did you check Volume Control by right-clicking the speaker icon on the menu bar? On one occasion, I saw similar behavior - it turned out that the system picked the wrong sound device after booting. Once I had set the proper one under Volume Control > Files >Change Device, the problem was solved.

Uhh... No guys. The BIOS appears to be muting it. This is an embedded system and does not even have CMOS setup... Its one of those TV recording boxes. It used to be running MS WindowsCE with lots of custom MS stuff on it. Very similar to xbox in its architecture... This thing just has more ram and different video chip, other than that they are practically identical.

dwpbike: Get Firefox 2

jay73: I should have said that the box runs Debian sarge. Anyway, when I'm in X, I don't have any volume control applets started. I'm just using alsamixer for volumes. Which brings me to a question... Are there some kind of controls for OSS? There used to be something called "ossmix" back in the day... But its missing from Debian, there is no such package anywhere or any package that contains it.

I need someone to help me reverse engineer alsaconf to do exactly what it does...
I just might make changes to it so it will not require any input from me.
Such help would be appreciated if anyone knows much about it.

Sorry, it's been quite a while since I used Sarge so this has become one big blur to me. Have you searched the Linux sound how-to yet?
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/

i noticed this

You can also look at the utils/alsasound file. This script is designed for the RedHat distribution, but it can be used with other distributions which use System V style rc init scripts. This will allow you to load your modules at boot time. If you want to do this you could just compile them into the kernel instead and save yourself the hassle of coming to terms with the rc init scripts.

but then also noticed aumix, which might be too simplistic.

tanks for the ff2 tip, i'm headed there.

Erm... The system loads the modules and detects the hardware, programs work without errors BUT NO SOUND.
IT STAYS MUTED UNTIL I RUN alsaconf WHICH UNMUTES IT.
Of course alsamixer does not produce the result - it uses OSS which is muted.
Manually reloading "modprobe snd-intel8x0" and other modules breaks everything, including OSS.
I need to know exactly HOW alsaconf makes it work.
At this point I am ready to give up on this thread and just copy and modify alsaconf to complete configuration without my input on each boot. I was just hoping someone would step me through what alsaconf does.
For one last time, this is not a regular desktop or laptop computer, it does not work like one but it does share some hardware in common.
This is not my first experience with sound in Linux and I know HOW it works, but this time its a hardware issue that requires a WORKAROUND.
I am the last developer left on this project and I do not have all the resources it used to have - I cannot write a new BIOS for this thing so I have to work with that I've got.