howdy kobedf
Sound setup can generally be tricky at times. First off: are you using the ALSA-drivers that are included in the kernel, or did you d/l the sources from the ALSA-site, or did you do some APT/DSELECT-thing?
If you have installed ALSA via "dselect" or "apt-get" I can't tell you much as I don't use those tools too much as they never gave me a single software-piece without a thorough headache, but that's a different story.
In case it's the kernel-version, make sure you have "Alsa"-support checked and also check if you have included support for the respective sound-chip of your mobo. More info about the HW would be necessary at this point to tell you something more specific (mobo-vendor/type, soundchip). It's also possible that the support for ALSA is already there and the module just doesn't get loaded.
I did all my ALSA installs by compiling the sources from the ALSA-site. For this you need to make sure that you
only have soundcard-support enabled in the kernel-config. The ALSA-driver then does the rest.
The "./configure"-run can take heaps of parameters, so I recommend to do something like
"./configure --help > alsa_options.txt"
first. This creates the above textfile with infos about what you exactly can pass to "confgure" as parameters. Take a thorough look at those and pick the options you need to pass to "configure". This should look something like ...
# ./configure --with-cards=emu10k1 --with-sequencer=yes
[and so on]
You will find plenty of info about supported chips and cards plus many installation docs on ...
>
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/Lil tip: If you ever plan to give Doom3/Linux a go, also activate the otherwisely deprecated OSS, as this is the only sound-system Doom3 supports (haven't tested if it would also run without OSS as I have OSS installed anyway for some sound-apps)
hope that helps