Hello. A couple weeks ago I switched over to linux. I've managed to get everything up and running except my sound, and was wondering if anyone knows the solution or has a link that could help. I'm running SuSE 8.1 professional on a sony viao laptop. In Yast2 the sound card comes up as 82801CA/CAM AC'97 which is correct. HOwever when I shove an audio cd into the drive I hear nothing. I have turned up the volume, and the song titles are displaying so it is reading from the cd rom. I've been searching for days through google groups, message boards, etc and have not found any solution that worked. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
sound card configuration
Please forgive the following scattergun approach to problem solving. 
Can you play a wav or mp3? You haven't said what you've tried, either, nor what software you're using to attempt playing the CD.
Do you have anything that looks like a sound entry in /dev ?? For example, /dev/snd /dev/pcm, etc....
Have you seen this??
from http://glou.net/~thomas/pcg-fx301.html
In Linux, you will have to recompile your kernel or use precompiled binaries, namely : sound support (CONFIG_SOUND), and the VIA AC97 audio option (CONFIG_SOUND_VIA82CXXX), as well as its MIDI interface (CONFIG_MIDI_VIA82CXXX). This should be enough. The module to load would be via82cxxx_audio.
Of course, the info's a tad old. Is there a Suse support forum you might ask in?
Hello. Thanks for the reply. I've tried playing the cds in the gnome cd player and also kscd. in /dev i have the snd directory with a bunch of stuff in it, no pcm direcotry, however in the snd directory there are several files like pcmC..... I actually don't have any mp3 or anything on the computer, however it does play beeps when i recieve mail and stuff. I have hit the suse mailing list and hopefully i get something from that.. I hadn't seen that link before, so now i'm off to learn how to recompile. Thanks!
24 days later
Just a follow up in case anyone else has this problem, the recompile didn't fix the issue (of course that could be user error...) anyway, it turns out that if i pass in pci=acpi in the boot paramters then it all works fine.