well, more often than not, the sound card support is compiled into the kernel, and should be all set. Try running
from the terminal, it will give you a "text-based gui" for adjusting the system volumes. Make sure nothing is muted (mute is denoted by an "M" at the top of the column.) once finished, use su to become root and:
to store the new volumes as default
This is just an educated guess -- It might not be the problem at all. Now, as for rpm and bin packages, for the bin files just type
Code:
chmod +x filename.bin
./filename.bin
RPM's are installed using a utility, aptly named rpm. In most cases, typing
Code:
rpm -i packagename.rpm
will do it all for you, If there are other options needed, oftentimes wherever you downloaded the rpm from will tell you so.
Good luck!