I've got pretty much everything set up with my SuSE 9.3, except the sound.
I could never get it to work. I have a hda-intel sound card with a Realtek ALC880 chip.
I'm running a P4 x86_64. Kernel version is 2.6.11.4-21.9-smp. KDE 3.4.2 Level "b"

I downloaded the latest ALSA.
I downloaded the Realtek driver (which is just the ALSA again).
I ran alsamixer to check that nothing is muted.
I ran alsaconf and it said everything was ok.

YaST tells me I have a sound card but when I try to configure it it says:
"An error occured during the installation of I/O Controller Hub High Definition Audio.
The kernel module snd-hda-intel for sound support could not be loaded. This can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters."

I am perusing the Alsa FAQ and trouble shooting guide at alsa.opensrc.org/TroubleShooting

Here's what they say:
1) Check that the ALSA drivers are compiled as modules.
How do I do this??

2) Check the ALSA driver version.
When I try to check /proc/asound/version to see what's there, it's an empty file! In fact, all the files there are empty (cards, devices, meminfo, modules, pcm, timers and version).

3) see if I have the latest library version of alsa libraries.
It seems that I do:
grep VERSION_STR /usr/include/alsa/version.h
#define SND_LIB_VERSION_STR "1.0.9"

4) Check the sound drivers for your card are active.
I typed lspci | egrep audio and it returns nothing.

At this point I give up.
Why does alsaconfig say that my soundcard is fine? It tells me it's playing a test sound and that everything is ok but it's obviously not!

Could anyone please illuminate me regarding this problem.
All the other hardware was detected fine (well, expect for the screen resolution and size but I figured out how to fix that), I would think that a simple onboard sound card would not be a problem.

Cheers

your sound card might be broken

It's a brand new machine that I just bought a few weeks ago.

Actually, I'd like to ammend my first post. In YaST I only get that error message

("An error occured during the installation of I/O Controller Hub High Definition Audio.
The kernel module snd-hda-intel for sound support could not be loaded. This can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.")

when I try to add a new card (I/O Controller Hub High Definition is under the "available cards" section).

But it does show, under "Already Configured Sound Cards", that I have the HDA Intel, configured as snd-card-0. And if I go, say, to "volume" on that card then I see that the volumes are set at around 90% and not muted, and when I press the "test" button nothing happens and I can't hear anything from the computer speaker, or from headphones.