Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

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SOUND — Sound card support

If you have a sound card in your computer, i.e. if it can say more than an isolated beep, say yes. Be sure to have all the information about your sound card and its configuration down (I/O port, interrupt and DMA channel), because you will be asked for it.

Read the Sound-HOWTO, available from http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto. General information about the modular sound system is contained in the file Documentation/sound/oss/Introduction. The file Documentation/sound/oss/README.OSS contains some slightly outdated but still useful information as well. Newer sound driver documentation can be found in files in the Documentation/sound/alsa directory.

If you have a PnP sound card and you want to configure it at boot time using the ISA PnP tools (read http://www.roestock.demon.co.uk/isapnptools), you need to compile sound card support as a module and load that module after the PnP configuration is finished. To do this properly, read Documentation/sound/oss/README.modules

I'm told that even without a sound card, you can make your computer say more than an occasional beep by programming the PC speaker. Kernel patches and supporting utilities to do that are in the pcsp package, available at ftp://ftp.infradead.org/pub/pcsp.