no errors, but no sound
 

ok, so it was time for a reinstall, so i did just that. i reinstalled slackware 8.1, as usual without any problems. the first thing i did next is compile a custom kernel. after all of that, i reboot, and everything is fine. ok, so time for some sound. when i configured my kernel, the only thing i said yes to in the sound section is sound support. i said no to everything else, thinking i didn' need any of it since i was going to use ALSA. i try to make alsa, but it wont even get started, saying something about no rule to make blah..... i did make dep, then make, and it worked perfectly. i did make install, rebooted and loaded the appropriate sound module, snd-intel8x0, again with no errors. but there is no sound. gnome loads error free. lsmod shows that all the necessary modules are loaded. the only thing i could find were these lines from dmesg:

PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:1f.5
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:1f.6
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1f.5 to 64
ALSA ../../alsa-kernel/pci/ac97/ac97_codec.c:1852: MC'97 1 converters and GPIO not ready (0xff00)
intel8x0: clocking to 48000

does anyone know what the problem is?
did i omit something important when configuring my kernel?

you need to build the alsa specific driver for your sound card and enable OSS emulation for existing sound apps to work.

if you use alsa and digital, first you need to unmute everything, then try disabling optical