Sound with ACER-Exensa 503T and Linux Kernel 2.2.x.

I installed SuSE Linux 6.0 on my brand new ACER Extensa 503T with Kernel 2.0.36.

I updated the Kernel to Version 2.2.5 to 2.2.9 and encountered problems with sound. The OSS from 2.2.x Kernel freezes the Computer when playing music (all kind of sound CD, wav, ...). I tried OSSfree for Kernel 2.0.36 instead of the standard Linux sound driver and noticed the same problem. The evaluation Version of commercial OSS for Kernel 2.2.x has the same problem.

Then I tried ALSA 0.3.0, ALSA 0.3.0-pre4 and ALSA 0.3.1, from http://www.alsa-project.org and had success.
Here is what I did.

Download the following files from www.alsa-project.org: 

alsa-driver-0.3.1.tar.gz
alsa-utils-0.3.1.tar.gz
alsa-lib-0.3.1.tar.gz
To install ALSA, read INSTALL and FAQ, and then do: Then put in /etc/conf.modules 
############### ALSA START
# ISA PnP support
#options isapnp isapnp_reserve_irq=9,10,11,12,13

# ALSA native device support
alias char-major-116 snd
options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1
# This is the driver setting
alias snd-card-0 snd-opl3sa

# OSS/Lite setup
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-pcm1-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm1-oss
alias sound-service-0-6 snd-pcm1-oss
############### ALSA END
I tested the sounddriver under SuSE 6.0 with Kernel 2.2.9 and KDE 1.0 using kmedia, kmix and kcd. The wavplay and wavrec from SuSE has problems with the Audio block size.

Then you can unpack alsa-utils-..., which brings some native utilities for ALSA, and alsa-lib-..., which brings the C-lib for compiling the alsa-utils.

xamixer2 which comes with alsa-utils-0.3.1.tar.gz works not perfect but it works :-)

Juergen