I have an old Dell Laptop (CPi 266XT) in which I installed Debian and upgraded the distribution to unstable. I then grabbed the kernel sources for Kernel 2.6.11 to build a Kernel specifily for the computer (I building using The Debian Way). Now everything is working except for my sound card (a Neomegic 256). The module that it should build is snd_nm256.ko. When I go into /lib/modules/2.6.11/kernel/sound I can see clearly it isn't compiling (it's not there). The kicker for this, is the first time I compiled this kernel it worked great. But after that initial compile I realized that I forgot to compile hotplug support (DOH! ) so I wasn't able to use my Linksys PCM200 cardbus NIC - that was the only change I made. Since I've done the re-compile, it won't compile the ALSA kernel driver so now I don't have a working sound card anymore (I'm on the 4th re-compile now). Any ideas on why this is happening and how I can get this module to compile like it did originally?

Check the kernel configuration.

Maybe you compiled the driver directly in the kernel and not as module (and this is generally good).
So try do see in if the kernel found your card.

You should also compile OSS support under sound -> alsa, beacuse most of the programs expect to use OSS mixer.