LinuxQuestions.org - what's insmod? (soundcard driver problem)

Hello,

my sound "card" is an onboard AC97 (the computer is an HP athlon 2000XP) in particular a Via Technology VT8233 (at least that's what sndconfig told me). When installing Redhat 9.0
(I installed everything on the rh 9.0 cd's because I was having OTHER problems with this)
the standard sound "card" driver (the one called vt8cxxx) didn't work so I go to Via Technologies website and get the driver listed for redhat 9.0. It happens to be a source code rpm. I follow the instructions and do a

rpmbuil --rebuild viaudiocombo-2.3-1.src.rpm ;
cd /usr/src/redhat/RPM ;
rpm -i viaudiocombo-2.3-1.i386.rpm

and I get the message below about tainting my kernel (which I think just means there's no warrenty and that the kernel hackers aren't obligated to fix it but it _SHOULD_ still work and is going to go ahead and try). And then it gives me the "insmod" error... so my questions are:

what's insmod?
How am I supposed to know which parameters to change?
How do I go about changing the parameters I'm supposed to change?

-------- install start --------
backup modules.conf to old.modules.conf
Warning: loading /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/sound/viaudiocombo.o will
taint the kernel: no license
See a url (had to snip it or I couldn't post) for information about tainted modules
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/sound/viaudiocombo.o: init_module: No such
device
Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.
You may find more information in syslog or the output from dmesg
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/sound/viaudiocombo.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/sound/viaudiocombo.o failed
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/sound/viaudiocombo.o: insmod viaudiocombo failed
-------- vinstall end --------

-Abijah