Currently dual-booting windoze95 with Linux Mandrake 7.2.
Everything runs fine except that I cannot get my onboard CMI8330 sound card to work. My computers specs:

Genuine Intel PII 333Mhz (100Mhz FSB)
192Mb of 100Mhz RAM
PC-Chips 'PC100' Motherboard with onboard CMI8330 s/c.
2xAGP ATI All-In-Wonder-Pro (*not* 128 version!)
RealTek 10/100 PCI Ethernet card (although my system is not networked yet).
Seagate 6Gb HD (of which Linux is given 2.1Gb)
AOpen 1040 Pro DVD Drive (EIDE, 2ndry slave)
Traxdata 2x2x6x CD-RW (EIDE, 2ndry master)
Can't think of anymore...

Although the s/c is onboard, it is an ISA card and is fully PNP compatible. I can't seem to get the ISAPNPTOOLS to work properly, don't know how to rebuild/make/whatever the kernal let alone include any module within it, etc.

Have tried SNDCONFIG (from within X and in console mode) and it recognizes my s/c, gets the info correct and then tries to configure it. All's well but when I reboot, nothing's changed. A v.big help as I'm desperately trying to get as far away from MS as I can!

You can try different drivers maybe from either http://www.alsa-project.org or http://www.opensound.com.

Just solved this problem for Red Hat 7.0. Apparently PnP does not apply to Linux. In a nutshell, the key to getting the sound card to work (assuming that the sound card is supported by the kernal) is to make sure that the interrupt (IRQ) and I/O ports are set properly (i.e. the values match between what is set in the device driver and in the card itself).

I actually went back to W98 and identified which IRQ the sound card was using. Found it at:
Start:Control Panels:System:Hardware Resources:IRQs
Turns out my Yamaha OPL3-Ax sound card was using IRQ=5.

Then (back in Linux), I ran "pnpdump > out", and examined the output to verify that the sound card was connected to serial port 1 (/dev/ttyS0).

Finally, I used this command to set the serial port explicitly:

setserial /dev/ttyS0 port 1 irq 5

Then I started to hear music through the CD. Now if only I knew how to increase the volume....

I did this several days ago; I hope I'm not leaving any steps out, but the concept is valid. There are several HOWTO guides related to sound at the various Linux sites. good luck

Hooray!
 

Just sort of left it alone for a while. Last night, was reading through the 'instructions' on how to get my s/c working. It says that I should include it as a module - buggar that! I've finally got it working now, and I didn't include it as a module, I simply included it in the kernel itself! It reckons that it's an SB, but nevermind - it works!

Cheers for the support. I may include it as a module sometime in the future, once I understand more about them, but for now...

One step closer to ridding myself of Win.