building kernel for ac97 sound card

[Linux for blind general discussion]

I have an ac97 sound card and a c-media usb sound card on a system.  I
have only had success activating the pcspeaker when building a kernel for
gentoo.  I have no clue as to what to enable to get this done.  This is
even after having gone through lspci output and lsmod output with the
install-minimal dvd running the operating system  The speaker-test utility
puts out sound in the chroot environment and is silent after first boot
into the new environment made by the compiled kernel.


--