I bought my new machine with Linux-- though not my preferred distro-- loaded to assure hardware support. I reloaded the machine with my preferred distro, and all hardware, including the audio adapter, indeed is supported. The audio adapter is supported by ALSA, which, if I understand correctly, if effective and all other things are equal, is preferable to OSS . However, eight times out of ten, ALSA loses configuration apparently during shutdown, and
Code:
alsaconf
must be run after reboot. The following boot error may be pertinent:
Sat Jul 10 07:46:23 2010: amixer: Mixer hw:1 load error: Invalid argument
.

lspci -v:
00:0f.0 Audio device: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] Azalia Audio Controller
Subsystem: Dell Device 0281
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
Memory at fe9f8000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

best regards,

bezdomny

Dell Optiplex FX160
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny"
2.6.26-2-686 kernel
GDE
Intel Atom 1.6 GHz
1.9 GB RAM
HDD:
* 180 GB ext3
* 51 GB NTFS for dual-boot WinXP Pro
DSL (AT&T) connection
Skype I.D. "b3zdomny"