Okay, unfortunatly my Coaxeant sound card was not supported by ALSA on Ubuntu 5.10 so I got a new one. But, I plugged my 2.1 speakers into the Green port (line in 1) and installed the drivers under Windows and it worked fine. But, when I booted into Ubuntu, first the verbose info on the bootsplash had "Setting up ALSA card 0" in the output, and Kmix worked (I only use KDE and Gnome is goofed up), but the volume module in the thing (that is supposed to adjust volume) just had a little glyph saying "AC97".

Even worse, even though the card is supported by ALSA it doesn't even play sounds under Linux!!! What is wrong here?