After many, too many hours of trying to resolve the onboard sound issue on this box I am at my wits end. Have tried EVERYTHING, drivers, updates, etc, along with reading hundreds of pages all over the net trying to resolve this.

I can get sound only from playing a CD(I know, this one is weird), all other sound from the card will not play, other than a few clicks if aRts is restarted.

Have also tried to run 'sndconfig' but that always bombs when it gets to the part where it has to 'play a sound'(the prog just hangs). Detects the card properly as an AC97 onboard.

Again, I have tried the ALSA thing, along with all the Via Drivers, etc.

Would love to be able to use Linux as a multimedia box for playing-recording-burning. Anything to get away from The Seattle Grip.

Mandrake is becoming more and more a likely option to install over the weekend as it seems from what I read, it a large problem in RedHat

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Specs:
AMD XP1800 on an MSI K333 Board
AC97 Onboard Sound Controller
512mb Ram - GeForce2 MMX 400 VidCard
RedHat 7.3 DualBoot / WinXp Pro
(all sound function is fine in xp pro)

AC 97 is sooooo common!!!
You should easily get it working!
In sndconfig, set the irq and dma settings as they have been set in the bios, and everything will work fine.
If redhat has this problem, mandrake will also have this problem. You will understand if you see what is INSIDE linux. sndconfig is nothing but a program which adds lines to your /etc/modules.conf for loading the required modules. Mandrake and Redhat both come with all the sound card modules so switching to mandrake will probably not help.

Anyway, it looks like the problem is the IRQ settings, check if there is an IRQ problem detected by modprobe while startup.

Well after a few more hours of trying to get both hard drive sound as well as cdrom sound(which I had prior), I now have sound on all fronts.

This motherboard has onboard AC97 sound-modem codecs, so I thought(after trying everything else) maybe the bios may have had something to do with it and by turning on the modem codec in the bios(which I had turned off) we know have sound houston.

Of course on the reboot Kudzo(?) detected the new modem device and I just let it configure it with its defaults and all is well once again on this box.

I am now one step further away from The Seattle Grip.

Life is good once again cuz I have sound! :)