I’m brand new to the Linux community and have loaded the latest version of Knoppix Linux on a Dell Latitude CP laptop with great success except for the sound drivers. I have gone to the Dell support web site as well as looked up my hardware on Linux-Laptop.net. It appears that all of these laptops were shipped with a Crystal 4237b sound chip of which there are tons of windows drivers on the web but no Linux drivers. Can anybody help a neebie through the process of finding the right software as well as how to load/configure it? Thanks

Well if you peek around the Dell site just a little longer, you might learn something. Such as... oh.. laptops have this little thing called acpi.. and Knoppix, along with Redhat and a whole pile of other distributions, come with no support by default. If you wanna switch to SuSE or Mandrake, you can have sound. Otherwise, go get yourself a fresh kernel from kernel.org, and a fresh ACPI patch from wherever those come from (on google), and go compile your own kernel from scratch.

Thanks, my Linux education continues! I will have to dig around for some information on acpi. I installed a version of SuSE (7.0) that I had and it could not identify the sound card either. I may need an updated version of SuSE or I’ll try Mandrake next. I only used the Knoppix because as a new user it seemed the easiest way to get started, but it already looks like I’m in a little over my head so it might be time to do a little treading water! Thanks again for the help.